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THE GLORY 
OF THE TRENCHES 



BY THE SAME AUTHOR 

CARRY ON : 
Letters in Wartime 

SLAVES OF FREEDOM 

THE RAFT 

THE GARDEN WITHOUT 
WALLS 

THE SEVENTH CHRISTMAS 

THE UNKNOWN COUNTRY 

THE ROAD TO AVALON 

FLORENCE ON A CERTAIN 
NIGHT 

THE WORKER AND OTHER 
POEMS 




Photograt'h by IVallcrs, Newark, N. J. 

LIEUTENANT CONINGSBY DAWSON 



CANADIAN FIELD ARTILLERY 



THE GLORY 
OF THE TRENCHES 

AN INTERPRETATION 

BY. 

CONINGSBY DAWSON 

Author of 
"Carry On: Letters in Wartime," etc. 



WITH AN INTRODUCTION 

BY HIS FATHER, W. J. DAWSON 



"The glory is all in the souls of the men 

— //'/ nothing external." — From ^' Carry On" 



NEW YORK: JOHN LANE COMPANY 

LONDON: JOHN LANE, THE BODLEY HEAD 
TORONTO: S. B. GUNDY .-. .-. MCMXVIII 



>^ 



A^ 



Copyright, 1917, 1918 
Sy International Magazine Compant 

Copyright, 1918 
By John Lane Company 



©C!.A494431 



TO YOU AT HOME 

Each night we panted till the runners came, 

Bearing your letters through the battle-smoke. 
Their path lay up Death Valley spouting Home, 

Across the ridge where the Hun's anger spoke 
In bursting shells and cataracts of pain; 

Then dozvn the road where no one goes by day. 
And so into the tortured, pockmarked plain 

Where dead men clasp their wounds and point the way. 
Here gas lurks treacherously and the wire 

Of old defences tangles up the feet; 
Faces and hands strain upward through the mire, 

Speaking the anguish of the Hun's retreat. 
Sometimes no letters came; the evening hate 

Dragged on till dawn. The ridge in flying spray 
Of hissing shrapnel told the runners' fate; 

We knew we should not hear from you that day — 
From you, who from the trenches of the mind 

Hurl back despair, smiling with sobbing breath, 
Writing your souls on paper to be kind, 

That you for us may take the sting from Death. 



CONTENTS 

PAGE 

To You AT Home. (Poem) 5 

How This Book Was Written .... 9 

In Hospital. (Poem) 18 

The Road to Blighty 19 

The Lads Away. (Poem) 52 

The Growing of the Vision ..... 53 

The Glory of the Trenches. (Poem) . 104 

God as We See Him ., ., ...... 105 



HOW THIS BOOK WAS WRITTEN 

In my book, The Father of a Soldier, I have 
already stated the conditions under which this 
book of my son's was produced. 

He was wounded in the end of June, 19 17, in 
the fierce struggle before Lens. He was at once 
removed to a base-hospital, and later on to a 
military hospital in London. There was grave 
danger of amputation of the right arm, but this 
was happily avoided. As soon as he could use 
his hand he was commandeered by the Lord High 
Commissioner of Canada to write an important 
paper, detailing the history of the Canadian 
forces in France and Flanders. This task kept 
him busy until the end of August, when he ob- 
tained a leave of two months to come home. He 
arrived in New York in September, and returned 
again to London in the end of October. 

The plan of the book grew out of his conversa- 
tions with us and the three public addresses which 
he made. The idea had already been suggested 
to him by his London publisher, Mr. John Lane. 
He had written a few hundred words, but had no 

9 



lo INTRODUCTION 

very keen sense of the value of the experiences 
he had been invited to relate. He had not even 
read his own pubHshed letters in Carry On. He 
said he had begun to read them when the book 
reached him in the trenches, but they made him 
homesick, and he was also afraid that his own 
estimate of their value might not coincide with 
ours, or with the verdict which the public has 
since passed upon them. He regarded his own 
experiences, which we found so thrilling, in the 
same spirit of modest depreciation. They were 
the commonplaces of the life which he had led, 
and he was sensitive lest they should be regarded 
as improperly heroic. No one was more aston- 
ished than he when he found great throngs eager 
to hear him speak. The people assembled an 
hour before the advertised time, they stormed 
the building as soon as the doors were open, and 
when every inch of room was packed they found 
a way in by the windows and a fire-escape. This 
public appreciation of his message indicated a 
value in it which he had not suspected, and led 
him to recognise that what he had to say was 
worthy of more than a fugitive utterance on a 
public platform. He at once took up the task 
of writing this book, with a genuine and delighted 
surprise that he had not lost his love of author- 
ship. He had but a month to devote to it, but by 



INTRODUCTION ii 

dint of daily diligence, amid many interruptions 
of a social nature, he finished his task before he 
left. The concluding lines were actually written 
on the last night before he sailed for England. 

We discussed several titles for the book. The 
Religion of Heroism was the title suggested by 
Mr. John Lane, but this appeared too didactic and 
restrictive. I suggested Souls in Khaki, but this 
admirable title had already been appropriated. 
Lastly, we decided on The Glory of the Trenches, 
as the most expressive of his aim. He felt that 
a great deal too much had been said about the 
squalor, filth, discomfort and suffering of the 
trenches. He pointed out that a very popular 
war-book which we were then reading had six 
paragraphs in the first sixty pages which de- 
scribed in unpleasant detail the verminous condi- 
tion of the men, as if this were the chief thing to 
be remarked concerning them. He held that it 
was a mistake for a writer to lay too much stress 
on the horrors of war. The effect was bad physi- 
ologically — it frightened the parents of soldiers ; 
it was equally bad for the enlisted man himself, 
for it created a false impression in his mind. 
We all knew that war was horrible, but as a rule 
the soldier thought little of this feature in his lot. 
It bulked large to the civilian who resented incon- 
venience and discomfort, because he had only 



12 INTRODUCTION 

known their opposites; but the soldier's real 
thoughts were concerned with other things. He 
was engaged in spiritual acts. He was accom- 
plishing spiritual purposes as truly as the martyr 
of faith and religion. He was moved by spir- 
itual impulses, the evocation of duty, the loyal 
dependence of comradeship, the spirit of sacrifice, 
the complete surrender of the body to the will 
of the soul. This was the side of war which men 
needed most to recognise. They needed it not 
only because it was the true side, but because 
nothing else could kindle and sustain the enduring 
flame of heroism in men's hearts. 

While some erred in exhibiting nothing but the 
brutalities of war, others erred by sentimentalis- 
ing war. He admitted that it was perfectly pos- 
sible to paint a portrait of a soldier with the 
aureole of a saint, but it would not be a repre- 
sentative portrait. It would be eclectic, the result 
of selection elimination. It would be as unlike 
the common average as Rupert Brooke, with his 
poet's face and poet's heart, was unlike the ordi- 
nary naval officers with whom he sailed to the 
^gean. 

The ordinary soldier is an intensely human 
creature, with an " endearing blend of faults and 
virtues." The romantic method of portraying 
him not only misrepresented him, but its result is 



INTRODUCTION 13 

far less impressive than a portrait painted in the 
firm Hnes of reaHty. There is an austere gran- 
deur in the reality of what he is and does which 
needs no fine gilding from the sentimentalist. 
To depict him as a Sir Galahad in holy armour 
is as serious an offence as to exhibit him as a 
Caliban of marred clay; each method fails of 
tru-th, and all that the soldier needs to be known 
about him, that men should honour him, is the 
truth. 

What my son aimed at in writing this book w^as 
to tell the truth about the men who were his com- 
rades, in so far as it was given him to see it. 
He was in haste to write while the impression 
was fresh in his mind, for he knew how soon the 
fine edge of these impressions grew dull as they 
receded from the immediate area of vision. " If 
I wait till the war is over, I shan't be able to 
write of it at all," he said. " You've noticed that 
old soldiers are very often silent men. They've 
had their crowded hours of glorious life, but they 
rarely tell you much about them. I remember 
you used to tell me that you once knew a man who 
sailed with Napoleon to St. Helena, but all he 
could tell you was that Napoleon had a fine leg 
and wore white silk stockings. If he'd written 
down his impressions of Napoleon day by day as 
he watched him w-alking the deck of the Bellero^ 



14 INTRODUCTION 

phfin, he'd have told you a great deal more about 
him than that he wore white silk stockings. If 
I wait till the war is over before I write about it, 
it's very likely I shall recollect only trivial details, 
and the big heroic spirit of the thing will escape 
me. There's only one way of recording an im- 
pression — catch it while it's fresh, vivid, vital; 
shoot it on the wing. If you wait too long it will 
vanish." It was because he felt in this way that 
he wrote in red-hot haste, sacrificing his brief 
leave to the task, and concentrating all his mind 
upon it. 

There was one impression that he was particu- 
larly anxious to record, — his sense of the spir- 
itual processes which worked behind the grim 
offence of war, the new birth of religious ideas, 
which was one of its most wonderful results. 
He had both witnessed and shared this renas- 
cence. It was too indefinite, too immature to be 
chronicled with scientific accuracy, but it was 
authentic and indubitable. It was atmospheric, 
a new air which men breathed, producing new en- 
ergies and forms of thought. Men were redis- 
covering themselves, their own forgotten nobili- 
ties, the latent nobilities in all men. Bound 
together in the daily obedience of self -surrender, 
urged by the conditions of their task to regard 
duty as inexorable, confronted by the pitiless de- 



INTRODUCTION 15 

struction of the body, they were forced into a 
new recognition of the spiritual values of life. 
In the common conventional use of the term these 
men were not religious. There was much in 
their speech and in their conduct which would 
outrage the standards of a narrow pietism. Tra- 
ditional creeds and forms of faith had scant 
authority for them. But they had made their 
own a surer faith than lives in creeds. It was 
expressed not in words but acts. They had freed 
their souls from the tyrannies of time and the 
fear of death. They had accomplished indeed 
that very emancipation of the soul which is the 
essential evangel of all religions, which all reli- 
gions urge on men, but which few men really 
achieve, however earnestly they profess the forms 
of pious faith. 

This was the true Glory of the Trenches. 
They were the Calvaries of a new redemption 
being wrought out for men by soiled unconscious 
Christs. And, as from that ancient Calvary, 
with all its agony of shame, tortur and derelic- 
tion, there flowed a flood of ligMt which made a 
new dawn for the world; so from these obscure 
crucifixions there would come to men a new reve- 
lation of the splendour of the human soul, the 
true divinity that dwells in man, the God made 
manifest in the flesh by acts of valour, heroism. 



:i6 INTRODUCTION 

and self-sacrifice which transcend the instincts 
and promptings of the flesh, and bear witness to 
the indestructible life of the spirit. 

It is to express these thoughts and convictions 
that this book was written. It is a record of 
things deeply felt, seen and experienced — this, 
first of all and chiefly. The lesson of what is 
recorded is incidental and implicit. It is left to 
the discovery of the reader, and yet is so plainly 
indicated that he cannot fail to discover it. We 
shall all see this war quite wrongly, and shall in- 
terpret it by imperfect and base equivalents, if 
we see it only as a human struggle for human 
ends. We shall err yet more miserably if all our 
thoughts and sensations about it are drawn from 
its physical horror, " the deformations of our 
common manhood " on the battlefield, the hope- 
less waste and havoc of it all. We shall only 
view it in its real perspective when we recognise 
the spiritual impulses which direct it, and the 
strange spiritual efficacy that is in it to burn out 
the deep-fibred cancer of doubt and decadence 
which has long threatened civilisation with a slow 
corrupt death. Seventy-five years ago Mrs. 
Browning, writing on The Greek Christian Poets, 
used a striking sentence to which the condition 
of human thought to-day lends a new emphasis. 
"We want," she said, "the touch of Christ's 



INTRODUCTION 17 

hand upon our literature, as it touched other dead 
things — we want the sense of the saturation of 
Christ's blood upon the souls of our poets that it 
may cry through them in answer to the ceaseless 
wail of the Sphinx of our humanity, expounding 
agony into renovation. Something of this has 
been perceived in art when its glory was at the 
fullest." It is this glory of divine sacrifice which 
is the Glory of the Trenches. It is because the 
writer recognises this that he is able to walk un- 
dismayed among things terrible and dismaying, 
and to expound agony into renovation. 

W. J. Dawson. 
February, 19 18. 



IN HOSPITAL 

Hushed and happy whiteness. 

Miles on tniles of cots. 
The glad contented brightness 

Where sunlight falls in spots. 

Sisters swift and saintly 

Seem to tread on grass; 
Like Howers stirring faintly, 

Heads turn to watch them pass. 

Beauty, blood, and sorrow. 

Blending in a trance — 
Eternity's to-morrow 

In this half-way house of France. 

Sounds of whispered talking. 
Laboured indraxvn breath; 

Then like a young girl walking 
The dear familiar Death. 



THE 
GLORY OF THE TRENCHES 

I 

THE ROAD TO BLIGHTY 

I am in hospital in London, lying between 
clean white sheets and feeling, for the first time 
in months, clean all over. At the end of the 
ward there is a swinging door; if I listen in- 
tently in the intervals when the gramophone isn't 
playing, I can hear the sound of bath-water run- 
ning — running in a reckless kind of fashion as 
if it didn't care how much was wasted. To me, 
so recently out of the fighting and so short a time 
in Blighty, it seems the finest music in the world. 
For the sheer luxury of the contrast I close my 
eyes against the July sunlight and imagine myself 
back in one of those narrow dug-outs where it 
isn't the thing to undress because the row may 
start at any minute. 

Out there in France we used to tell one another 
fairy-tales of how we would spend the first year 

19 



20 THE GLORY OF THE TRENCHES 

of life when war was ended. One man had a 
baby whom he'd never seen ; another a girl whom 
he was anxious to marry. My dream was more 
prosaic, but no less ecstatic — it began and ended 
with a large white bed and a large white bath. 
For the first three hundred and sixty-five morn- 
ings after peace had been declared I was to be 
wakened by the sound of my bath being filled ; 
water was to be so plentiful that I could tumble 
off to sleep again without even troubling to turn 
off the tap. In France one has to go dirty so 
often that the dream of being always clean seems 
as unrealisable as romance. Our drinking-water 
is frequently brought up to us at the risk of men's 
lives, carried through the mud in petrol-cans 
strapped on to packhorses. To use it carelessly 
would be like washing in men's blood 

And here, most marvellously, with my dream 
come true, I lie in the whitest of white beds. 
The sunlight filters through trees outside the win- 
dow and weaves patterns on the floor. Most 
wonderful of all is the sound of the water so 
luxuriously running. Some one hops out of bed 
and re-starts the gramophone. The music of 
the bath-room tap is lost. 

Up and down the ward, with swift precision, 
nurses move softly. They have the unanxious 
-eyes of those whose days are mapped out with 



THE GLORY OF THE TRENCHES 21 

duties. They rarely notice us as individuals. 
They ask no questions, show no curiosity. Their 
deeds of persistent kindness are all performed im- 
personally. It's the same with the doctors. This 
is a military hospital where discipline is firmly 
enforced; any natural recognition of common 
fineness is discouraged. These women who have 
pledged themselves to live among suffering, never 
allow themselves for a moment to guess what the 
sight of them means to us chaps in the cots. 
Perhaps that also is a part of their sacrifice. But 
we follow them with our eyes, and we wish that 
they would allow themselves to guess. For so 
many months we have not seen a woman; there 
have been so many hours when we expected never 
again to see a woman. We're Lazaruses ex- 
humed and restored to normal ways of life by 
the fluke of having collected a bit of shrapnel — 
we haven't yet got used to normal ways. The 
mere rustle of a woman's skirt fills us with unrea- 
sonable delight and makes the eyes smart with 
memories of old longings. Those childish long- 
ings of the trenches! No one can understand 
them who has not been there, where all personal 
aims are a wash-out and the courage to endure 
remains one's sole possession. 

The sisters at the Casualty Clearing Station — 
they understood. The Casualty Qearing Station 



^2 THE GLORY OF THE TRENCHES 

is the first hospital behind the Hne to which the 
wounded are brought down straight from the 
Dressing-Stations. All day and all night ambu- 
lances come lurching along shell-torn roads to 
their doors. The men on the stretchers are still 
in their bloody tunics, rain-soaked, pain-silent, 
splashed with the corruption of fighting — their 
bodies so obviously smashed and their spirits so 
obviously unbroken. The nurses at the Casualty 
Clearing Station can scarcely help but imder- 
stand. They can afford to be feminine to men 
who are so weak. Moreover, they are near 
enough the Front to share in the sublime exalta- 
tion of those who march out to die. They know 
when a big offensive is expected, and prepare for 
it. They are warned the moment it has com- 
menced by the distant thunder of the guns. 
Then comes the ceaseless stream of lorries and 
ambulances bringing that which has been broken 
so quickly to them to be patched up in months. 
They work day and night with a forgetfulness of 
self which equals the devotion of the soldiers they 
are tending. Despite their orderliness they seem 
almost fanatical in their desire to spend them- 
selves. They are always doing, but they can 
never do enough. It's the same with the sur- 
geons. I know of one who during a great attack 
operated for forty-eight hours on end and finally 



THE GLORY OF THE TRENCHES 2^ 

went to sleep where he stood from utter weari- 
ness. The picture that forms in my mind of 
these women is absurd, Arthurian and exact; I 
see them as great ladies, mediaeval in their saint- 
liness, sharing the pollution of the battle with 
their champions. 

Lying here with nothing to worry about in the 
green serenity of an English summer, I realize 
that no man can grasp the splendour of this war 
until he has made the trip to Blighty on a 
stretcher. What I mean is this: so long as a 
fighting man keeps well, his experience of the 
war consists of muddy roads leading up through 
a desolated country to holes in the ground, in 
which he spends most of his time watching other 
holes in the ground, which people tell him are the 
Hun front-line. This experience is punctuated 
by periods during which the earth shoots up about 
him like corn popping in a pan, and he experiences 
the insanest fear, if he's made that way, or the 
most satisfying kind of joy. About once a year 
something happens which, when it's over, he 
scarcely believes has happened : he's told that he 
can run away to England and pretend that there 
isn't any war on for ten days. For those ten 
days, so far as he's concerned, hostilities are sus- 
pended. He rides post-haste through ravaged 
villages to the point from which the train starts. 



24 THE GLORY OF THE TRENCHES 

Up to the very last moment until the engine pulls 
out, he's quite panicky lest some one shall come 
and snatch his warrant from him, telling him 
that leave has been cancelled. He makes his 
journey in a carriage in which all the windows 
are smashed. Probably it either snows or rains. 
During the night while he stamps his feet to 
keep warm, he remembers that in his hurry to 
escape he's left all his Hun souvenirs behind. 
During his time in London he visits his tailor at 
least twice a day, buys a vast amount of unnec- 
essary kit, sleeps late, does most of his resting 
in taxi-cabs, eats innumerable meals at restau- 
rants, laughs at a great many plays in which life 
at the Front is depicted as a joke. He feels 
dazed and half suspects that he isn't in London 
at all, but only dreaming in his dug-out. Some 
days later he does actually wake up in his dug- 
out ; the only proof he has that he's been on leave 
is that he can't pay his mess-bill and is minus a 
hundred pounds. Until a man is wounded he 
only sees the war from the point of view of the 
front-line and consequently, as I say, misses half 
its splendour, for he is ignorant of the greatness 
of the heart that beats behind him all along the 
lines of communication. Here in brief is how 
I found this out. 

The dressing-station to which I went was un- 



THE GLORY OF THE TRENCHES 25 

derneath a ruined house, under full observation 
of the Hun and in an area which was heavily 
shelled. On account of the shelling and the fact 
that any movement about the place would attract 
attention, the wounded were only carried out by 
night. Moreover, to get back from the dressing- 
station to the collecting point in rear of the lines, 
the ambulances had to traverse a white road over 
a ridge full in view of the enemy. The Huns 
kept guns trained on this road and opened fire 
at the least sign of traffic. When I presented 
myself I didn't think that there was anything 
seriously the matter; my arm had swelled and 
was painful from a wound of three days' stand- 
ing. The doctor, however, recognised that septic 
poisoning had set in and that to save the arm an 
operation was necessary without loss of time. 
He called a sergeant and sent him out to consult 
with an ambulance-driver. " This officer ought 
to go out at once. Are you willing to take a 
chance ? " asked the sergeant. The ambulance- 
driver took a look at the chalk road gleaming 
white in the sun where it climbed the ridge. 
" Sure, Mike," he said, and ran off to crank his 
engine and back his car out of its place of con- 
cealment. " Sure, Mike," — that was all. He'd 
have said the same if he'd been asked whether 
he'd care to take a chance at Hell. 



^6 THE GLORY OF THE TRENCHES 

I have three vivid memories of that drive. The 
first, my own uneasy sense that I was deserting. 
Frankly I didn't want to go out; few men do 
when it comes to the point. The Front has its 
own pecuhar exhilaration, like big game-hunting, 
discovering the North Pole, or anything that's 
dangerous ; and it has its own peculiar reward — 
the peace of mind that comes of doing something 
beyond dispute unselfish and superlatively worth 
while. It's odd, but it's true that in the front- 
line many a man experiences peace of mind for 
the first time and grows a little afraid of a return 
to normal ways of life. My second memory is 
of the wistful faces of the chaps whom we passed 
along the road. At the unaccustomed sound of 
a car travelling in broad daylight the Tommies 
poked their heads out of hiding-places like rab- 
bits. Such dirty Tommies! How could they 
be otherwise living forever on old battlefields? 
H they were given time for reflection they 
wouldn't want to go out; they'd choose to stay 
with the game till the war was ended. But we 
caught them unaware, and as they gazed after 
us down the first part of the long trail that leads 
back from the trenches to Blighty, there was hun- 
ger in their eyes. My third memory is of 
kindness. 

You wouldn't think that men would go to war 



THE GLORY OF THE TRENCHES 27 

to learn how to be kind — but they do. There's 
no kinder creature in the whole wide world than 
the average Tommy. He makes a friend of any 
stray animal he can find. He shares his last 
franc with a chap who isn't his pal. He risks 
his life quite inconsequently to rescue any one 
who's wounded. When he's gone over the top 
with bomb and bayonet for the express purpose 
of " doing in " the Hun, he makes a comrade of 
the Fritzie he captures. You'll see him coming 
down the battered trenches with some scared lad 
of a German at his side. He's gabbling away 
making throat-noises and signs, smiling and doing 
his inarticulate best to be intelligible. He pats the 
Hun on the back, hands him chocolate and ciga- 
rettes, exchanges souvenirs and shares with him 
his last luxury. If any one interferes with his 
Fritzie he's willing to fight. When they come 
to the cage where the prisoner has to be handed 
over, the farewells of these companions whose 
acquaintance has been made at the bayonet-point 
are often as absurd as they are affecting. I sup- 
pose one only learns the value of kindness when 
he feels the need of it himself. The men out 
there have said " Good-bye " to everything they 
loved, but they've got to love some one — so they 
give their affections to captured Fritzies, stray 
dogs, fellows who've collected a piece of a shell 



28 THE GLORY OF THE TRENCHES 

— in fact to any one who's a little worse off than 
themselves. My ambulance-driver was like that 
with his " Sure, Mike." He was like it during 
the entire drive. When he came to the white 
road which climbs the ridge with all the enemy 
country staring at it, it would have been excusable 
in him to have hurried. The Hun barrage might 
descend at any minute. All the way, in the 
ditches on either side, dead pack animals lay; in 
the dug-outs there were other unseen dead 
making the air foul. But he drove slowly and 
gently, skirting the shell-holes with diligent care 
so as to spare us every unnecessary jolting, I 
don't know his name, shouldn't recognise his 
face, but I shall always remember the almost 
womanly tenderness of his driving. 

After two changes into other ambulances at 
different distributing points, I arrived about nine 
on a summer's evening at the Casualty Clearing 
Station. In something less than an hour I was 
undressed and on the operating table. 

You might suppose that when for three in- 
terminable years such a stream of tragedy has 
flowed through a hospital, it would be easy for 
surgeons and nurses to treat mutilation and death 
perfunctorily. They don't. They show no emo- 
tion. They are even cheerful; but their strained 



THE GLORY OF THE TRENCHES 29 

faces tell the story and their hands have an im- 
mense compassion. 

Two faces especially loom out. I can always 
see them by lamp-light, when the rest of the ward 
is hushed and shrouded, stooping over some silent 
bed. One face is that of the Colonel of the hos- 
pital, grey, concerned, pitiful, stern. His eyes 
seem to have photographed all the suffering which 
in three years they have witnessed. He's a tall 
man, but he moves softly. Over his uniform he 
wears a long white operating smock — he never 
seems to remove it. And he never seems to sleep, 
for he comes wandering through his Gethsemane 
all hours of the night to bend over the more 
serious cases. He seems haunted by a vision of 
the wives, mothers, sweethearts, whose happiness 
is in his hands. I think of him as a Christ in 
khaki. 

The other face is of a girl — a sister I ought 
to call her. She's the nearest approach to a 
sculptured Greek goddess I've seen in a living 
woman. She's very tall, very pale and golden, 
with wide brows and big grey eyes like Trilby. 
I wonder what she did before she went to war — 
for she's gone to war just as truly as any soldier. 
I'm sure in the peaceful years she must have 
spent a lot of time in being loved. Perhaps her 



30 THE GLORY OF THE TRENCHES 

man was killed out here. Now she's ivory- 
white with over-service and spends all her days 
in loving. Her eyes have the old frank, innocent 
look, but they're ringed with being weary. Only 
her lips hold a touch of colour ; they have a child- 
ish trick of trembling when any one's wound is 
hurting too much. She's the first touch of home 
that the stretcher-cases see when they've said 
good-bye to the trenches. She moves down the 
ward; eyes follow her. When she is absent, 
though others take her place, she leaves a lone- 
liness. H she meant much to men in days gone 
by, to-day she means more than ever. Over 
many dying boys she stoops as the incarnation 
of the woman whom, had they lived, they would 
have loved. To all of us, with the blasphemy 
of destroying still upon us, she stands for the 
divinity of womanhood. 

What sights she sees and what words she 
hears; yet the pity she brings to her work pre- 
serves her sweetness. In the silence of the night 
those who are delirious re-fight their recent bat- 
tles. You're half-asleep, when in the darkened 
ward some one jumps up in bed, shouting, " Hold 
your bloody hands up." He thinks he's captur- 
ing a Hun trench, taking prisoners in a bombed 
in dug-out. In an instant, like a mother with a 
frightened child, she's bending over him; soon 



THE GLORY OF THE TRENCHES 31 

she has coaxed his head back on the pillow. Men 
do not die in vain when they evoke such women. 

And the men — the chaps in the cots ! As a 
patient the first sight you have of them is a muddy 
stretcher. The care with which the bearers ad- 
vance is only equalled by the waiters in old- 
established London Clubs when they bring in one 
of their choicest wines. The thing on the 
stretcher looks horribly like some of the forever 
silent people you have seen in No Man's Land. 
A pair of boots you see, a British Warm flung 
across the body and an arm dragging. A screen 
is put round a bed ; the next sight you have of him 
is a weary face lying on a white pillow. Soon 
the chap in the bed next to him is questioning. 

"What's yours?" 

" Machine-gun caught me in both legs." 

" Going to lose 'em? " 

*' Don't know. Can't feel much at present. 
Hope not." 

Then the questioner raises himself on his el- 
bow. "How's it going?" 

It is the attack. The conversation that fol- 
lows is always how we're hanging on to such 
and such an objective and have pushed forward 
three hundred yards here or have been bent back 
there. One thing you notice : every man forgets 
his own catastrophe in his keenness for the sue- 



32 THE GLORY OF THE TRENCHES 

cess of the offensive. Never in all my fortnight's 
journey to Blighty did I hear a word of self-pity 
or complaining. On the contrary, the most 
severely wounded men would profess themselves 
grateful that they had got off so lightly. Since 
the war started the term " lightly " has become 
exceedingly comparative. I suppose a man is 
justified in saying he's got off lightly when what 
he expected was death. 

I remember a big Highland officer who had 
been shot in the knee-cap. He had been oper- 
ated on and the knee-cap had been found to be so 
splintered that it had had to be removed; of this 
he was unaware. For the first day as he lay in 
bed he kept wondering aloud how long it would 
be before he could re-join his battalion. Per- 
haps he suspected his condition and was trying 
to find out. All his heart seemed set on once 
again getting into the fighting. Next morning 
he plucked up courage to ask the doctor, and 
received the answer he had dreaded. 

" Never. You won't be going back, old chap. " 

Next time he spoke his voice was a bit throaty. 
''Will it stiffen?" 

" You've lost the knee-joint," the doctor said, 
** but with luck v/e'll save the leg." 

His voice sank to a whisper. "If you do, it 
won't be much good, will it?" 



THE GLORY OF THE TRENCHES 33 

" Not much." 

He lay for a couple of hours silent, re- 
adjusting his mind to meet the new conditions. 
Then he commenced talking with cheerfulness 
about returning to his family. The habit of 
courage had conquered — the habit of courage 
which grows out of the knowledge that you let 
your pals down by showing cowardice. 

The next step on the road to Blighty is from 
the Casualty Station to a Base Hospital in France. 
You go on a hospital train and are only allowed 
to go when you are safe to travel. There is 
always great excitement as to when this event 
will happen; its precise date usually depends on 
what's going on up front and the number of fresh 
casualties which are expected. One morning you 
awake to find that a tag has been prepared, con- 
taining the entire medical history of your injury. 
The stretcher-bearers come in with grins on their 
faces, your tag is tied to the top button of your 
pyjamas, jocular appointments are made by the 
fellows you leave behind — many of whom you 
know are dying — to meet you in London, and 
you are carried out. The train is thoroughly 
equipped with doctors and nurses ; the lying cases 
travel in little white bunks. No one who has 
not seen it can have any idea of the high good 
spirits which prevail. You're going off to 



34 THE GLORY OF THE TRENCHES 

Blighty, to Piccadilly, to dry boots and clean 
beds. The revolving wheels underneath you 
seem to sing the words, " Off to Blighty — to 
Blighty." It begins to dawn on you what it will 
be like to be again your own master and to sleep 
as long as you like. 

Kindness again — always kindness ! The sis- 
ters on the train can't do enough; they seem to 
be trying to exceed the self-sacrifice of the sisters 
you have left behind. You twist yourself so that 
you can get a glimpse of the flying country. It's 
green, undisturbed, unmarred by shells — there 
are even cows! 

At the Base Hospital to which I went there 
was a man who performed miracles. He was a 
naturalised American citizen, but an Armenian 
by birth. He gave people new faces. 

The first morning an officer came in to visit a 
friend; his face was entirely swathed in band- 
ages, with gaps left for his breathing and his eyes. 
He had been like that for two years, and looked 
like a leper. When he spoke he made hollow 
noises. His nose and lower jaw had been torn 
away by an exploding shell. Little by little, with 
infinite skill, by the grafting of bone and flesh, 
his face was being built up. Could any surgery 
be more merciful? 

In the days that followed I saw several of these 



THE GLORY OF THE TRENCHES 35 

masked men. The worst cases were not allowed 
to walk about. The ones I saw were invariably 
dressed with the most scrupulous care in the 
smartest uniforms, Sam Browns polished and 
buttons shining. They had hope, and took a 
pride in themselves — a splendid sign ! Perhaps 
you ask why the face-cases should be kept in 
France. I was not told, but I can guess — be- 
cause they dread going back to England to their 
girls until they've got rid of their disfigurements. 
So for two years through their bandages they 
watch the train pull out for Blighty, while the 
damage which was done them in the fragment 
of a second is repaired. 

At a Base Hospital you see something which 
you don't see at a Casualty Station — sisters, 
mothers, sweethearts and wives sitting beside the 
beds. They're allowed to come over from Eng- 
land when their man is dying. One of the won- 
derful things to me was to observe how these 
women in the hour of their tragedy catch the 
soldier spirit. They're very quiet, very cheerful, 
very helpful. With passing through the ward 
they get to know some of the other patients and 
remember them when they bring their own man 
flowers. Sometimes when their own man is 
asleep, they slip over to other bedsides and do 
something kind for the solitary fellows. That's 



36 THE GLORY OF THE TRENCHES 

the army all over; military discipline is based on 
unselfishness. These women who have been sent 
for to see their men die, catch from them the 
spirit of undistressed sacrifice and enrol them- 
selves as soldiers. 

Next to my bed there was a Colonel of a north 
country regiment, a gallant gentleman who posi- 
tively refused to die. His wife had been with 
him for two weeks, a little toy woman v^rith nerves 
worn to a frazzle, who masked her terror with 
a brave, set smile. The Colonel had had his leg 
smashed by a whizz-bang when leading his troops 
into action. Septic poisoning had set in and the 
leg had been amputated. It had been found nec- 
essary to operate several times owing to the 
poison spreading, with the result that, being far 
from a young man, his strength was exhausted. 
Men forgot their own wounds in watching this 
one man's fight for life. He became symbolic 
of what, in varying degrees, we were all doing. 
When he was passing through a crisis the whole 
ward waited breathless. There was the finest 
kind of rivalry between the night and day sisters 
to hand him over at the end of each twelve hours 
with his pulse stronger and temperature lower 
than when they received him. Each was sure 
she had the secret of keeping him alive. 

You discovered the spirit of the man when 



THE GLORY OF THE TRENCHES 37 

you heard him wandering in delirium. All night 
in the shadowy ward with its hooded lamps, he 
would be giving orders for the comfort of his 
men. Sometimes he'd be proposing to go for- 
ward himself to a place where a company was 
having a hot time; apparently one of his officers 
was trying to dissuade him. " Danger be 
damned," he'd exclaim in a wonderfully strong 
voice. " It'll buck 'em up to see me. Splendid 
chaps — splendid chaps ! " 

About dawn he was usually supposed to be 
sinking, but he'd rallied again by the time the 
day-sister arrived. " Still here," he'd smile in 
a triumphant kind of whisper, as though bluffing 
death was a pastime. 

One afternoon a padre came to visit him. As 
he was leaving he bent above the pillow. We 
learnt afterwards that this was what he had 
said, "If the good Lord lets you, I hope you'll 
get better." 

We saw the Colonel raise himself up on his 
elbow. His weak voice shook with anger. 
** Neither God nor the Devil has anything to do 
with it. I'm going to get well." Then, as the 
nurse came hurrying to him, he sank back. 

When I left the Base Hospital for Blighty he 
was still holding his own. I have never heard 
what happened to him, but should not be at all 



38 THE GLORY OF THE TRENCHES 

surprised to meet him one day in the trenches 
with a wooden leg, still leading his splendid 
chaps. Death can't kill men of such heroic 
courage. 

At the Base Hospital they talk a good deal 
of " the Blighty Smile." It's supposed to be the 
kind of look a chap wears when he's been told 
that within twenty-four hours he'll be in Eng- 
land. When this information has been imparted 
to him, he's served out with warm socks, woollen 
cap and a little linen bag into which to put his 
valuables. Hours and hours before there's any 
chance of starting you'll see tlie lucky ones lying 
very still, with a happy vacant look in their eyes 
and their absurd woollen caps stuck ready on 
their heads. Sometime, perhaps in the small 
hours of the morning, the stretcher-bearers, ar- 
rive — the stretcher-bearers who all down the 
lines of communication are forever carrying 
others towards blessedness and never going them- 
selves. " At last," you whisper to yourself. 
You feel a glorious anticipation that you have 
not known since childhood when, after three 
hundred and sixty-four days of waiting, it was 
truly going to be Christmas. 

On the train and on the passage there is the 
same skilful attention — the same ungrudging 
kindness. You see new faces in the bunks beside 



THE GLORY OF THE TRENCHES 39 

you. After the tedium of the narrow confines 
of a ward that in itself is exciting. You fall 
into talk. 

"What's yours?" 

" Nothing much — just a hand off and a splin- 
ter or two in the shoulder." 

You laugh. " That's not so dusty. How 
much did you expect for your money? " 

Probably you meet some one from the part of 
the line where you were wounded — with luck 
even from your own brigade, battery or battal- 
ion. Then the talk becomes all about how things 
are going, whether we're still holding on to our 
objectives, who's got a blighty and who's gone 
west. One discussion you don't often hear — 
as to when the war will end. To these civilians 
in khaki it seems that the war has always been 
and that they will never cease to be soldiers. 
For them both past and future are utterly ob- 
literated. They would not have it otherwise. 
Because they are doing their duty they are con- 
tented. The only time the subject is ever touched 
on is when some one expresses the hope that it'll 
last long enough for him to recover from his 
wounds and get back into the line. That usually 
starts another man, who will never be any more 
good for the trenches, wondering whether he can 
get into the flying corps. The one ultimate hope 



40 THE GLORY OF THE TRENCHES 

of all these shattered wrecks who are being hur- 
ried to the Blighty they have dreamt of, is that 
they may again see service. 

The tang of salt in the air, the beat of waves 
and then, incredible even when it has been real- 
ised, England. I think they ought to make the 
hospital trains which run to London all of glass, 
then instead of watching little triangles of flying 
country by leaning uncomfortably far out of their 
bunks, the wounded would be able to drink their 
full of the greenness which they have longed for 
so many months. The trees aren't charred and 
blackened stumps; they're harps between the 
knees of the hills, played on by the wind and 
sun. The villages have their roofs on and chil- 
dren romping in their streets. The church spires 
haven't been knocked down; they stand up tall 
and stately. The roadsides aren't littered with 
empty shell-cases and dead horses. The fields 
are absolutely fields, with green crops, all wavy, 
like hair growing. After the tonsured filth 
we've been accustomed to call a world, all this 
strikes one as unnatural and extraordinary. 
There's a sweet fragrance over everything and 
one's throat feels lumpy. Perhaps it isn't good 
for people's health to have lumpy throats, and 
that's why they don't run glass trains to London. 

Then, after such excited waiting, you feel that 



THE GLORY OF THE TRENCHES 41 

the engine is slowing down. There's a hollow 
rumbling; you're crossing the dear old wrinkled 
Thames. If you looked out you'd see the dome 
of St. Paul's like a bubble on the sky-line and 
smoking chimneys sticking up like thumbs — 
things quite ugly and things of surpassing beauty, 
all of which you have never hoped to see again 
and which in dreams you have loved. But if 
you could look out, you wouldn't have the time. 
You're getting 3'our things together, so you won't 
waste a moment when they come to carry you 
out. Very probably you're secreting a souvenir 
or two about your person: something you've 
smuggled down from the front which will really 
prove to your people that you've made the ac- 
quaintance of the Hun. As though your wounds 
didn't prove that sufficiently. Men are childish. 

The engine comes to a halt. You can smell 
the cab-stands. You're really there. An officer 
comes through the train enquiring whether you 
have any preference as to hospitals. Your girl 
lives in Liverpool or Glasgow or Birmingham. 
Good heavens, the fellow holds your destiny in 
his hands! He can send you to Whitechapel if 
he likes. So, even though he has the same rank 
as yourself, you address him as, " Sir." 

Perhaps it's because Pve practised this di- 
plomacy — I don't know. Anyway, he's granted 



42 THE GLORY OF THE TRENCHES 

my request. I'm to stay in London. I was par- 
ticularly anxious to stay in London, because one 
of my young brothers from the Navy is there on 
leave at present. In fact he wired me to France 
that the Admiralty had allowed him a three-days' 
special extension of leave in order that he might 
see me. It was on the strength of this message 
that the doctors at the Base Hospital permitted 
me to take the journey several days before I was 
really in a condition to travel. 

I'm wondering whether he's gained admission 
to the platform. I lie there in my bunk all eyes, 
expecting any minute to see him enter. Time 
and again I mistake the blue serge uniform of 
the St. John's Ambulance for that of a naval 
lieutenant. They come to carry me out. What 
an extraordinarily funny way to enter London — 
on a stretcher ! I've arrived on boat-trains from 
America, troop trains from Canada, and come 
back from romantic romps in Italy, but never 
in my wildest imaginings did I picture myself 
arriving as a wounded soldier on a Red Cross 
train. 

Still clutching my absurd linen bag, which 
contains my valuables, I lift my head from the 
pillow gazing round for any glimpse of that 
much-desired brother. Now they've popped me 
onto the upper-shelf of a waiting ambulance; I 



THE GLORY OF THE TRENCHES 43 

can see nothing except what hes out at the back. 
I at once start explaining to the nurse who ac- 
companies us that I've lost a very valuable 
brother — that he's probably looking for me 
somewhere on the station. She's extremely 
sym.pathetic and asks the chauffeur to drive very 
slowly so that we may watch for him as we go 
through the station gates into the Strand. 

We're delayed for some minutes while par- 
ticulars are checked up of our injuries and des- 
tinations. The lying cases are placed four in 
an ambulance, with the flap raised at the back 
so we can see out. The sitting cases travel in 
automobiles, buses and various kinds of vehicles. 
In my ambulance there are two leg-cases with 
most theatrical bandages, and one case of trench- 
fever. We're immensely merry — all except the 
trench-fever case who has conceived an immense 
sorrow for himself. We get impatient with 
waiting. There's an awful lot of cheering going 
on somewhere; we suppose troops are marching 
and can't make it out. 

Ah, we've started! At a slow crawl to pre- 
vent jarring we pass through the gates. We dis- 
cover tlie meaning of the cheering. On either 
side the people are lined in dense crowds, waving 
and shouting. It's Saturday evening when they 
should be in the country. It's jolly decent of 



44 THE GLORY OF THE TRENCHES 

them to come here to give us such a welcome. 
Flower-girls are here with their baskets full of 
flowers — just poor girls with a living to earn. 
They run after us as we pass and strew us with 
roses. Roses ! We stretch out our hands, press- 
ing them to our lips. How long is it since we 
held roses in our hands? How did these girls 
of the London streets know that above all things 
we longed for flowers? It was worth it all, the 
mud and stench and beastliness, when it was to 
this that the road led back. And the girls — 
they're even better than the flowers; so many 
pretty faces made kind by compassion. Some- 
where inside ourselves we're laughing; we're so 
happy. We don't need any one's pity; time 
enough for that when we start to pity ourselves. 
We feel mean, as though we were part of a big 
deception. We aren't half so ill as we look; if 
you put sufficient bandages on a wound you can 
make the healthiest man appear tragic. W^e're 
laughing — and then all of a sudden we're cry- 
ing. We press our faces against the pillow 
ashamed of ourselves. We won't see the 
crowds; we're angry with them for having un- 
manned us. And then we can't help looking; 
their love reaches us almost as though it were 
the touch of hands. We won't hide ourselves 



THE GLORY OF THE TRENCHES 45 

if we mean so much to them. We're not angry 
any more, but grateful. 

Suddenly the ambulance-nurse shouts to the 
driver. The ambulance stops. She's quite ex- 
cited. Clutching me with one hand, she points 
with the other, " There he is." 
"Who?" 

I raise myself. A naval lieutenant is standing 
against the pavement, gazing anxiously at the 
passing traffic. 

"Your brother, isn't it?" 
I shook my head. " Not half handsome 
enough." 

For the rest of the journey she's convinced I 
have a headache. It's no good telling her that 
I haven't; much to my annoyance and amuse- 
ment she swabs my forehead with eau-de- 
Cologne, telling me that I shall soon feel better. 
The streets through which we pass are on the 
south side of the Thames. It's Saturday even- 
ing. Hawkers' barrows line the kerb; women 
with draggled skirts and once gay hats are doing 
their Sunday shopping. We're having a kind 
of triumphant procession; with these people to 
feel is to express. We catch some of their re- 
marks : " '00 ! Look at 'is poor leg ! " " My, 
but ain't 'e done in shockin' ! " 



46 THE GLORY OF THE TRENCHES 

Dear old London — so kind, so brave, so 
frankly human! You're just like the chaps at 
the Front — you laugh when you suffer and give 
when you're starving; you never know when not 
to be generous. You wear your heart in your 
eyes and your lips are always ready for kissing. 
I think of you as one of your own flower-girls — 
hoarse of voice, slatternly as to corsets, with a 
big tumbled fringe over your forehead, and a 
heart so big that you can chuck away your roses 
to a wounded Tommy and go away yourself with 
an empty basket to sleep under an archway. Do 
you wonder that to us you spell Blighty? We 
love you. 

We come to a neighbourhood more respect- 
able and less demonstrative, skirt a common, are 
stopped at a porter's lodge and turn into a park- 
land. The glow of sunset is ended; the blue- 
grey of twilight is settling down. Between 
flowered borders we pick our way, pause here 
and there for directions and at last halt. Again 
the stretcher-bearers! As I am carried in I 
catch a glimpse of a low bungalow-building, with 
others like it dotted about beneath trees. There 
are red shaded lamps. Every one tiptoes in 
silence. Only the lips move when people speak; 
there is scarcely any sound. As the stretchers 
are borne down the ward men shift their heads 



THE GLORY OF THE TRENCHES 47 

to gcLze after them. It's past ten o'clock and 
patients are supposed to be sleeping now. I'm 
put to bed. There's no news of my brother; he 
hasn't 'phoned and hasn't called. I persuade one 
of the orderlies to ring up the hotel at which I 
know he was staying. The man is a long while 
gone. Through the dim length of the ward I 
watch the door into the garden, momentarily ex- 
pecting the familiar figure in the blue uniform 
and gold buttons to enter. He doesn't. Then 
at length the orderly returns to tell me that the 
naval lieutenant who was staying at the hotel, 
had to set out for his ship that evening, as there 
was no train that he could catch on Sunday. So 
he was steaming out of London for the North 
at the moment I was entering. Disappointed? 
Yes. One shrugs his shoulders. C'est la guerre, 
as we say in the trenches. You can't have every- 
thing when Europe's at war. 

I can hardly keep awake long enough for the 
sister to dress my arm. The roses that the 
flower-girls had thrown me are in water and 
within handstretch. They seem almost persons 
and curiously sacred — symbols of all the hero- 
ism and kindness that has ministered to me every 
step of the journey. It's a good little war I 
think to myself. Then, with the green smell of 
England in my nostrils and the rumbling of Lon- 



48 THE GLORY OF THE TRENCHES 

don in my ears, like conversation below stairs, 
I drowse off into the utter contentment of the 
first deep sleep I have had since I was wounded. 

I am roused all too soon by some one sticking 
a thermometer into my mouth. Rubbing my 
eyes, I consult my watch. Half -past five! 
Rather early ! Raising myself stealthily, I catch 
a glimpse of a neat little sister darting down the 
ward from bed to bed, tent-pegging every sleep- 
ing face with a fresh thermometer. Having 
made the round, back she comes to take posses- 
sion of my hand while she counts my pulse. I 
try to speak, but she won't let me remove the 
accursed thermometer; when she has removed it 
herself, off she goes to the next bed. I notice 
that she has auburn hair, merry blue eyes and a 
ripping Irish accent. I learn later that she's a 
Sinn Feiner, a sworn enemy to England who 
sings " Dark Rosaleen " and other rebel songs 
in the secret watches of the night. It seems to 
me that in taking care of England's wounded 
she's solving the Irish problem pretty well. 

Heavens, she's back again, this time with a 
bowl of water and a towel! Very severely and 
thoroughly, as though I were a dirty urchin, she 
scrubs my face and hands. She even brushes 
my hair. I watch her do the same for other 



THE GLORY OF THE TRENCHES 49 

patients, some of whom are Colonels and old 
enough to be her father. She's evidently in no 
mood for proposals of marriage at this early 
hour, for her technique is impartially severe to 
everybody, though her blue eyes are unfailingly 
laughing. 

It is at this point that somebody crawls out of 
bed, slips into a dressing-gown, passes through 
the swing door at the end of the ward and sets 
the bath-water running. The sound of it is 
ecstatic. 

Very soon others follow his example. They're 
chaps without legs, with an arm gone, a hand 
gone, back wounds, stomach wounds, holes in the 
head. They start chaffing one another. There's 
no hint of tragedy. A gale of laughter sweeps 
the ward from end to end. An Anzac captain 
is called on for a speech. I discover that he is 
our professional comic man and is called on to 
make speeches twenty times a day. They always 

start with, " Gentlemen, I will say this " 

and end with a flourish in praise of Australia. 
Soon the ward is made perilous by wheel-chairs, 
in which unskilful pilots steer themselves out into 
the green adventure of the garden. Birds are 
singing out there ; the guns had done for the birds 
in the places where we came from. Through 



50 THE GLORY OF THE TRENCHES 

open doors we can see the glow of flowers, dew- 
laden and sparkling, lazily unfolding their petals 
in the early sun. 

When the sister's back is turned, a one-legged 
officer nips out of bed and hops like a crow to 
the gramophone. The song that follows is a 
favourite. Curious that it should be, for it 
paints a dream which to many of these mutilated 
men — Canadians, Australians, South Africans, 
Imperials — will have to remain only a dream, so 
long as life lasts. Girls don't marry fellows 
without arms and legs — at least they didn't in 
peace days before the world became heroic. As 
the gramophone commences to sing, heads on 
pillows hum the air and fingers tap in time on the 
sheets. It's a peculiarly childish song for men 
who have seen what they have seen and done 
what they have done, to be so fond of. Here's 
the way it runs: — 

" We'll have a little cottage in a little town 
And we'll have a little mistress in a dainty gown, 
A little doggie, a little cat, 
A little doorstep with welcome on the mat ; 
And we'll have a little trouble and a little strife, 
But none of these things matter when you've got a little 

wife. 
We shall be as happy as the angels up above 
With a little patience and a lot of love." 



THE GLORY OF THE TRENCHES 51 

A little patience and a lot of love ! I suppose 
that's the line that's caught the chaps. Behind 
all their smiling and their boyish gaiety they 
know that they'll need both patience and love to 
meet the balance of existence with sweetness and 
soldierly courage. It won't be so easy to be 
soldiers when they get back into mufti and go 
out into the world cripples. Here in their pyja- 
mas in the summer sun, they're making a first 
class effort. I take another look at them. No, 
there'll never be any whining from men such as 
these. 

Some of us will soon be back in the fighting — 
and jolly glad of it. Others are doomed to re- 
main in the trenches for the rest of their lives 
— not the trenches of the front-line where 
they've been strafed by the Hun, but the trenches 
of physical curtailment where self-pity will launch 
wave after wave of attack against them. It won't 
be easy not to get the " wind up." It'll be diffi- 
cult to maintain normal cheerfulness. But 
they're not the men they were before they went 
to war — out there they've learnt something. 
They're game. They'll remain soldiers, what- 
ever happens. 



THE LADS AWAY 

All the lads Jmve gone out to play 
At being soldiers, far away; 
They won't be back for many a day. 
And sofne won't be back any morning. 

All the lassies who laughing zvere 
When hearts were light and lads were here. 
Go sad-eyed, wandering hither and there — 
They pray and they watch for the morning. 

Every house has its vacant bed 
And every night, when sounds are dead, 
Some woman yearns for the pillowed head 
Of him who marched out in the morning. 

Of all the lads who've gone out to play 
There's some'll return and some who'll stay; 
There's some will be back 'most any day — 
But some won't wake up in the morning. 



II 

THE GROWING OF THE VISION 

I'm continuing in America the book which I 
thought out during the golden July and August 
daj's when I lay in the hospital in London. I've 
been here a fortnight ; everything that's happened 
seems unbelievably wonderful, as though it had 
happened to some one other than myself. It'll 
seem still more wonderful in a few weeks' time 
when I'm where I hope I shall be — back in the 
mud at the Front. 

Here's how this miraculous turn of events oc- 
curred. When I went before my medical board 
I was declared unfit for active service for at least 
two months. A few days later I went in to 
General Headquarters to see what were the 
chances of a trip to New York. The officer 
whom I consulted pulled out his watch, " It's 
noon now. There's a boat-train leaving Euston 
in two and a half hours. Do you think you can 
pack up and make it ? " 

Did I think! 

"You watch me," I cried. 
53 



54 THE GLORY OF THE TRENCHES 

Dashing out into Regent Street I rounded up 
a taxi and raced about London like one pos- 
sessed, collecting kit, visiting tailors, withdrawing 
money, telephoning friends with whom I had din- 
ner and theatre engagements. It's an extraor- 
dinary characteristic of the Army, but however 
hurried an officer may be, he can always spare 
time to visit his tailor. The fare I paid my taxi- 
driver was too monstrous for words; but then 
he'd missed his lunch, and one has to miss so 
many things in war-times that when a new straw 
of inconvenience is piled on the camel, the camel 
expects to be compensated. Anyway, I was on 
that boat-train when it pulled out of London. 

I was in uniform when I arrived in New York, 
for I didn't possess any mufti. You can't guess 
what a difference that made to one's home- 
coming — not the being in uni form, but the 
knowing that it wasn't an offence to wear it. 
On my last leave, some time ago before I went 
overseas, if I'd tried to cross the border from 
Canada in uniform I'd have been turned back; 
if by any chance I'd got across and worn regi- 
mentals I'd have been arrested by the first Irish 
policeman. A place isn't home where you get 
turned back or locked up for wearing the things 
of which you're proudest. If America hadn't 
come into the war none of us who have loved 



THE GLORY OF THE TRENCHES 55 

her and since been to the trenches, would ever 
have wanted to return. 

But she's home now as she never was before 
and never could have been under any other cir- 
cumstances — now that khaki strides unabashed 
down Broadway and the skirl of the pipers has 
been heard on Fifth Avenue. We men " over 
there " will have to find a. new name for 
America. It won't be exactly Blighty, but a kind 
of very wealthy first cousin to Blighty — a word 
meaning something generous and affectionate 
and steam-heated, waiting for us on the other 
side of the Atlantic, 

Two weeks here already — two weeks more to 
go ; then back to the glory of the trenches ! 

There's one person I've missed since my re- 
turn to New York. I've caught glimpses of him 
disappearing around corners, but he dodges. I 
think he's a bit ashamed to meet me. That per- 
son is my old civilian self. What a full-blo\vn 
egoist he used to be! How full of golden plans 
for his own advancement! How terrified of 
failure, of disease, of money losses, of death — 
of all the temporary, external, non-essential 
things that have nothing to do with the spirit! 
War is in itself damnable — a profligate misuse 
of the accumulated brain-stuff of centuries. 
Nevertheless, there's many a man who has no 



56 THE GLORY OF THE TRENCHES 

l©ve of war, who previous to the war had 
cramped his soul with Httleness and was chased 
by the bayonet of duty into the blood-stained 
largeness of the trenches, who has learnt to say, 
" Thank God for this war." He thanks God not 
because of the carnage, but because when the 
wine-press of new ideals was being trodden, he 
was born in an age when he could do his share. 

America's going through just about the same 
experience as myself. She's feeling broader in 
the chest, bigger in the heart and her eyes are 
clearer. When she catches sight of the America 
that she was, she's filled with doubt — she can't 
believe that that person with the Stars and Stripes 
wrapped round her and a money-bag in either 
hand ever was herself. Home, clean and hon- 
ourable for every man who ever loved her and 
has pledged his life for an ideal with the Allies 
— that's what she's become now. 

I read again the words that I wrote about those 
chaps in the London hospital, men who had 
journeyed to their Calvary glad-hearted from 
the farthest corners of the world. From this 
distance I see them in truer perspective than 
when we lay companions side by side in that long 
line of neat, white cots. I used to grope after 
ways to explain them — to explain the courage 
which in their utter heroism they did not realise 



THE GLORY OF THE TRENCHES 57 

they possessed. They had grown so accustomed 
to a brave way of Hving that they sincerely be- 
lieved they were quite ordinary persons. That's 
courage at its finest — when it becomes uncon- 
scious and instinctive. 

At first I said, " I know why they're so cheer- 
ful — it's because they're all here in one ward 
together. They're all mutilated more or less, so 
they don't feel that they're exceptional. It's as 
though the whole world woke up with toothache 
one morning. At breakfast every one would be 
feeling very sorry for himself; by lunch-time, 
when it had become common knowledge that the 
entire world had the same kind of ache, tooth- 
ache would have ceased to exist. It's the lone- 
liness of being abnormal in your suffering that 
hurts." 

But it wasn't that. Even while I was con- 
fined to the hospital, in hourly contact with the 
chaps, I felt that it wasn't that. When I was 
allowed to dress and go down West for a few 
hours everyday, I knew that I was wrong most 
certainly. In Piccadilly, Hyde Park, theatres, 
restaurants, river-places on the Thames you'd 
see them, these men who were maimed for life, 
climbing up and down buses, hobbling on their 
crutches independently through crowds, hailing 
one another cheerily from taxis, drinking life 



'58 THE GLORY OF THE TRENCHES 

joyously in big gulps without complaint or sense 
of martyrdom, and getting none of the dregs. 
A part of their secret was that through their 
experience in the trenches they had learnt to be 
self-forgetful. The only time I ever saw a 
wounded man lose his temper was when some one 
out of kindness made him remember himself. 
A sudden down-pour of rain had commenced; it 
was towards evening and all the employees of the 
West End shopping centre were making haste 
to get home to the suburbs. A young Highland 
officer who had lost a leg scrambled into a bus 
going to Wandsworth. The inside of the bus 
was jammed, so he had to stand up clutching on 
to a strap. A middle-aged gentleman rose from 
his seat and offered it to the Highlander. The 
Highlander smiled his thanks and shook his head. 
The middle-aged gentleman in his sympathy be- 
came pressing, attracting attention to the officer's 
infirmity. It was then that the officer lost his 
temper. I saw him flush. 

" I don't want it," he said sharply. " There's 
nothing the matter with me. Thanks all the 
same. I'll stand." 

This habit of being self-forgetful gives one 
time to be remindful of others. Last January, 
during a brief and glorious ten days' leave, I 
went to a matinee at the Coliseum. Vesta Tilley 



THE GLORY OF THE TRENCHES 59 

was doing an extraordinarily funny impersona- 
tion of a Tommy just home from the comfort of 
the trenches; her sketch depicted the terrible dis- 
comforts of a fighting man on leave in Blighty. 
If I remember rightly the refrain of her song 
ran somewhat in this fashion: 

" Next time they want to give me six days' leave 
Let 'em make it six months' 'ard." 

There were two officers, a major and a cap- 
tain, behind us ; judging by the sounds they made, 
they were getting their full money's worth of 
enjoyment. In the interval, when the lights 
went up, I turned and saw the captain putting a 
cigarette between the major's lips; then, having 
gripped a match-box between his knees so that 
he might strike the match, he lit the cigarette for 
his friend very awkwardly. I looked closer and 
discovered that the laughing captain had only one 
hand and the equally happy major had none at 
all. 

Men forget their own infirmities in their en- 
deavour to help each other. Before the war we 
had a phrase which has taken on a new meaning 
now; we used to talk about "lending a hand." 
To-day we lend not only hands, but arms and 
eyes and legs. The wonderful comradeship 
learnt in the trenches has taught men to lend their 



6o THE GLORY OF THE TRENCHES 

bodies to each other — out of two maimed bodies 
to make up one which is whole, and sound, and 
shared. You saw this all the time in hospital. 
A man who had only one leg would pal up with 
a man who had only one arm. The one-armed 
man would wheel the one-legged man about the 
garden in a chair; at meal-times the one-legged 
man would cut up the one-armed man's food for 
him. They had both lost something, but by 
pooling what was left they managed to own a 
complete body. By the time the war is ended 
there'll be great hosts of helpless men who by 
combining will have learnt how to become help- 
ful. They'll establish a new standard of very 
simple and cheerful socialism. 

There's a point I want to make clear before 
I forget it. All these men, whether they're cap- 
turing Hun dug-outs at the Front or taking pris- 
oner their own despair in English hospitals, are 
perfectly ordinary and normal. Before the war 
they were shop-assistants, cab-drivers, plumbers, 
lawyers, vaudeville artists. They were men of 
no heroic training. Their civilian callings and 
their previous social status were too various for 
any one to suppose that they were heroes ready- 
made at birth. Something has happened to them 
since they marched away In khaki — something 
that has changed them. They're as completely 



THE GLORY OF THE TRENCHES 6i 

re-made as St. Paul was after he had had his 
vision of the opening heavens on the road to 
Damascus. They've brought their vision back 
with them to civiHan Hfe, despite the lost arms 
and legs which they scarcely seem to regret; 
their souls still triumph over the body and the 
temporal. As they hobble through the streets 
of London, they display the same gay courage 
that was theirs when at zero hour, with a fifty- 
fifty chance of death, they hopped over the top 
for the attack. 

Often at the Front I have thought of Christ's 
explanation of his own unassailable peace — an 
explanation given to his disciples at the Last 
Supper, immediately before the walk to Gethsem- 
ane: *' Be of good cheer, I have overcome the 
world." Overcoming the world, as I understand 
it, is overcoming self. Fear, in its final analy- 
sis, is nothing but selfishness. A man who is 
afraid in an attack, isn't thinking of his pals and 
how quickly terror spreads; he isn't thinking of 
the glory which will accrue to his regiment or 
division if the attack is a success; he isn't think- 
ing of what he can do to contribute to that suc- 
cess; he isn't thinking of the splendour of forcing 
his spirit to triumph over weariness and nerves 
and the abominations that the Huns are chucking 
at him. He's thinking merely of how he can 



62 THE GLORY OF THE TRENCHES 

save his worthless skin and conduct his entirely 
unimportant body to a place where there aren't 
any shells. 

In London as I saw the work-a-day, uncon- 
scious nobility of the maimed and wounded, the 
words, " I have overcome the world," took an 
added depth. All these men have an " I-have- 
overcome-the-world " look in their faces. It's 
comparatively easy for a soldier with traditions 
and ideals at his back to face death calmly; to 
be calm in the face of life, as these chaps are, 
takes a graver courage. 

What has happened to change them? These 
disabilities, had they happened before the war, 
would have crushed and embittered them. They 
would have been woes utterly and inconsolably 
unbearable. Intrinsically their physical disable- 
ments spell the same loss to-day that they would 
have in 1912. The attitude of mind in which 
they are accepted alone makes them seem less. 
This attitude of mind or greatness of soul — 
whatever you like to call it — was learnt in the 
trenches where everything outward is polluted 
and damnable. Their experience at the Front has 
given them what in the Army language is known 
as " guts." " Guts " or courage is an attitude 
of mind towards calamity — an attitude of mind 
which makes the honourable accomplishing of 



THE GLORY OF THE TRENCHES 63 

duty more permanently satisfying than the 
preservation of self. But how did this vision 
come to these men? How did they rid them- 
selves of their civilian flabbiness and acquire it? 
These questions are best answered autobiograph- 
ically. Here briefly, is the story of the growth of 
the vision within myself. 

In August, 19 14, three days after war had 
been declared, I sailed from Quebec for Eng- 
land on the first ship that put out from Canada. 
The trip had been long planned — it was not 
undertaken from any patriotic motive. My fam- 
ily, which included my father, mother, sister and 
brother, had been living in America for eight 
years and had never returned to England to- 
gether. It was the accomplishing of a dream 
long cherished, which favourable circumstances 
and a sudden influx of money had at last made 
possible. We had travelled three thousand miles 
from our ranch in the Rockies before the war- 
cloud burst ; obstinacy and curiosity combined 
made us go on, plus an entirely British feeling 
that by crossing the Atlantic during the crisis 
we'd be showing our contempt for the Germans. 

We were only informed that the ship was 
going to sail at the very last moment, and went 
aboard in the evening. The word spread quickly 
among the crews of other vessels lying in har- 



64 THE GLORY OF THE TRENCHES 

hour; their firemen, keen to get back to Eng- 
land and have a whack at the Huns, tried to 
board our ship, sometimes by a ruse, more often 
by fighting. One saw some very pretty fist 
work that night as he leant across the rail, won- 
dering whether he'd ever reach the other side. 
There were rumours of German warships wait- 
ing to catch us in mid-ocean. Somewhere to- 
wards midnight the would-be stowaways gave up 
their attempt to force a passage; they squatted 
with their backs against the sheds along the 
quayside, singing patriotic songs to the accom- 
paniment of mouth-organs, confidently asserting 
that they were sons of the bull-dog breed and 
never, never would be slaves. It w^as all very 
amusing; war seemed to be the finest of excuses 
for an outburst of high spirits. 

Next morning, when we came on deck for a 
breath of air the vessel was under way; all hands 
were hard at work disguising her with paint of 
a sombre colour. Here and there you saw an 
officer in uniform, who had not yet had time to 
unpack his mufti. The next night, and for the 
rest of the voyage, all port-holes were darkened 
and we ran without lights. An atmosphere of 
suspense became omnipresent. Rumours spread 
like wild-fire of sinkings, victories, defeats, 
marching and countermarchings, engagements 



THE GLORY OF THE TRENCHES 65 

on land and water. With the uncanny and un- 
accustomed sense of danger we began to realise 
that we, as individuals, were involved in a Euro- 
pean war. 

As we got about among the passengers we 
found that the usual spirit of comradeship which 
marks an Atlantic voyage, was noticeably lack- 
ing. Every person regarded every other person 
with distrust, as though he might be a spy. Peo- 
ple were secretive as to their calling and the 
purpose of their voyage; litde by little we dis- 
covered that many of them were government 
officials, but that most were professional soldiers 
rushing back in the hope that they might be in 
time to join the British Expeditionary Force. 
Long before we had guessed that a world tragedy 
was impending, they had judged war's advent 
certain from its shadow, and had come from the 
most distant parts of Canada that they might 
be ready to embark the moment the cloud burst. 
Some of them were travelling with their wives 
and children. What struck me as wholly un- 
reasonable was that these professional soldiers 
and their families were the least disturbed people 
on board. I used to watch them as one might 
watch condemned prisoners in their cells. Their 
apparent indifference was unintelligible to me. 
They lived their daily present, contented and un- 



66 THE GLORY OF THE TRENCHES 

unruffled, just as if it were going to be their 
present always. I accused them of being lacking 
in imagination. I saw them lying dead on 
battlefields. I saw them dragging on into old 
age, with the spine of life broken, mutilated and 
mauled. I saw them in desperately tight corners, 
fighting in ruined villages with sword and bay- 
onet. But they joked, laughed, played with their 
kiddies and seemed to have no realisation of the 
horrors to which they were going. There was a 
world-famous aviator, who had gone back on his 
marriage promise that he would abandon his 
aerial adventures. He was hurrying to join the 
French Flying Corps. He and his young wife 
used to play deck-tennis every morning as light- 
heartedly as if they were travelling to Europe for 
a lark. In my many accusations of these men's 
indifference I never accused them of courage. 
Courage, as I had thought of it up to that time, 
was a grim affair of teeth set, sad eyes and 
clenched hands — the kind of " My head is 
bloody but unbowed " determination described 
in Henley's poem. 

When we had arrived safe in port we were 
held up for some time. A tug came out, bring- 
ing a lot of artificers who at once set to work 
tearing out the fittings of the ship that she might 
be converted into a transport. Here again I 



THE GLORY OF THE TRENCHES 67 

witnessed a contrast between the soldierly and 
the civilian attitude. The civilians, with their 
easily postponed engagements, fumed and fretted 
at the delay in getting ashore. The officers took 
the inconvenience with philosophical good- 
humour. While the panelling and electric-light 
fittings were being ripped out, they sat among the 
debris and played cards. There was heaps of 
time for their appointment — it was only with 
wounds and Death. To me, as a civilian, their 
coolness was almost irritating and totally incom- 
prehensible. I found a new explanation by say- 
ing that, after all, war was their professional 
chance — in fact, exactly what a shortage in the 
flour-market was to a man who had quantities 
of wheat on hand. 

That night we travelled to London, arriving 
about two o'clock in the morning. There was 
little to denote that a European war was on, 
except that people were a trifle more animated 
and cheerful. The next day was Sunday, and we 
motored round Hampstead Pleath. The Heath 
was as usual, gay with pleasure-seekers and 
the streets sedate with church-goers. On Mon- 
day, when we tried to transact business and ex- 
change money, we found that there were hitches 
and difiiculties ; it was more as though a window 
had been left open and a certain untidiness had 



68 THE GLORY OF THE TRENCHES 

resulted. " It will be all right to-morrow," 
everybody said. " Business as usual," and they 
nodded. 

But as the days passed it wasn't all right. 
Kitchener began to call for his army. Belgium 
was invaded. We began to hear about atroci- 
ties. There were rumours of defeat, which 
ceased to be rumours, and of grey hordes press- 
ing towards Paris. It began to dawn on the 
most optimistic of us that the little British Army 
— the Old Contemptibles — hadn't gone to 
France on a holiday jaunt. 

The sternness of the hour was brought home 
to me by one obscure incident. Straggling 
across Trafalgar Square in mufti and com- 
manded by a sergeant came a little procession of 
recruits. They were roughly dressed men of 
the navvy and the coster class. All save one car- 
ried under his arm his worldly possessions, 
wrapped in cloth, brown-paper or anything that 
had come handy. The sergeant kept on giving 
them the step and angrily imploring them to pick 
it up. At the tail of the procession followed 
a woman ; she also carried a package. 

They turned into the Strand, passed by Char- 
ing Cross and branched off to the right down a 
lane to the Embankment. At the point where 
they left the Strand, the man without a parcel 



THE GLORY OF THE TRENCHES 69 

spoke to the sergeant and fell out of the ranks. 
He laid his clumsy hand on the woman's arm; 
she set down on the pavement the parcel she had 
been carrying. There they stood for a full 
minute gazing at each other dumbly, oblivious to 
the passing crowds. She wasn't pleasing to look 
at — just a slum woman with draggled skirts, a 
shawl gathered tightly round her and a mildewed 
kind of bonnet. He was no more attractive — a 
hulking Samson, perhaps a day-labourer, who 
whilst he had loved her, had probably beaten her. 
They had come to the hour of parting, and there 
they stood in the London sunshine inarticulate 
after life together. He glanced after the proces- 
sion; it was two hundred yards away by now. 
Stooping awkwardly for the burden which she 
had carried for him, in a shame-faced kind of 
way he kissed her; then broke from her to follow 
his companions. She watched him forlornly, 
her hands hanging empty. Never once did he 
look back as he departed. Catching up, he took 
his place in the ranks ; they rounded a corner and 
were lost. Her eyes were quite dry; her jaw 
sagged stupidly. For some seconds she stared 
after the way he had gone — her man! Then 
she wandered off as one who had no purpose. 

Wounded men commenced to appear in the 
streets. You saw them in restaurants, looking 



70 THE GLORY OF THE TRENCHES 

happy and embarrassed, being paraded by proud 
families. One day I met two in my tailor's 
shop — one had an arm in a sling, the other's 
head had been seared by a bullet. It was whis- 
pered that they were officers who had " got it " 
at Mons. A thrill ran through me — a thrill of 
hero-worship. 

At the Empire Music Hall in Leicester Square, 
tragedy bared its broken teeth and mouthed at 
me. We had reached the stage at which we had 
become intensely patriotic by the singing of 
songs. A beautiful actress, who had no thought 
of doing "her bit" herself, attired as Britannia, 
with a colossal Union Jack for background, came 
before the footlights and sang the recruiting song 
of the moment, 

" We don't want to lose you 
But we think you ought to go." 

Some one else recited a poem calculated to shame 
men into immediate enlistment, two lines of 
which I remember : 

" I wasn't among the first to go 
But I went, thank God, I went." 

The effect of such urging was to make me 
angry. I wasn't going to be rushed into khaki 
on the spur of an emotion picked up in a music- 



THE GLORY OF THE TRENCHES 71 

hall. I pictured the comfortable gentlemen, 
beyond the military age, who had written these 
heroic taunts, had gained reputation by so doing, 
and all the time sat at home in suburban security. 
The people who recited or sung their effusions, 
made me equally angry; they were making 
sham-patriotism a means of livelihood and had 
no intention of doing their part. All the world 
that by reason of age or sex was exempt from the 
ordeal of battle, was shoving behind all the rest 
of the world that was not exempt, using the 
younger men as a shield against his own terror 
and at the same time calling them cowards. 
That was how I felt. I told myself that if I 
went — and the if seemed very remote — I 
should go on a conviction and not because of 
shoving. They could hand me as many white 
feathers as they liked, I wasn't going to be swept 
away by the general hysteria. Besides, where 
would be the sense in joining? Everybody said 
that our fellows would be home for Christmas. 
Our chaps who were out there ought to know; 
in writing home they promised it themselves. 

The next part of the music-hall performance 
was moving pictures of the Germans' march into 
Brussels. I was in the Promenade and had 
noticed a Belgian soldier being made much of by 
a group of Tommies. He was a queer looking 



^2 THE GLORY OF THE TRENCHES 

fellow, with a dazed expression and eyes that 
seemed to focus on some distant horror; his uni- 
form was faded and torn — evidently it had 
seen active service. I wondered by what strange 
fortune he had been conveyed from the brutali- 
ties of invasion to this gilded, plush-seated sensa- 
tion-palace in Leicester Square. 

I watched the screen. Through ghastly 
photographic boulevards the spectre conquer- 
ors marched. They came on endlessly, as 
though somewhere out of sight a human dam 
had burst, whose deluge would never be stopped. 
I tried to catch the expressions of the men, 
wondering whether this or that or the next had 
contributed his toll of violated women and 
butchered children to the list of Hun atrocities. 
Suddenly the silence of the theatre was startled 
by a low, infuriated growl, followed by a shriek 
which was hardly human. I have since heard 
the same kind of sounds when the stumps of the 
mutilated are being dressed and the pain has be- 
come intolerable. Everybody turned in their 
seats — gazing through the dimness to a point 
in the Promenade near to where I was. The 
ghosts on the screen were forgotten. The faked 
patriotism of the songs we had listened to had 
become a thing of naught. Through the welter 



THE GLORY OF THE TRENCHES 73 

of bombast, excitement and emotion we had 
grounded on reality. 

The Belgian soldier, in his tattered uniform, 
was leaning out, as though to bridge the space 
that divided him from his ghostly tormentors. 
The dazed look was gone from his expression 
and his eyes were focussed in the fixity of a cruel 
purpose — to kill, and kill, and kill the smoke- 
grey hordes of tyrants so long as his life should 
last. He shrieked imprecations at them, calling 
upon God and snatching epithets from the gutter 
in his furious endeavour to curse them. He was 
dragged away by friends in khaki, overpowered, 
struggling, smothered but still cursing. 

I learnt afterwards that he, with his mother 
and two brothers, had been the proprietors of 
one of the best hotels in Brussels. Both his 
brothers had been called to arms and were dead. 
Anything might have happened to his mother — 
he had not heard from her. He himself had 
escaped in the general retreat and was going back 
to France as interpreter with an English regi- 
ment. He had lost everything; it was the sight 
of his ruined hotel, flung by chance on the screen, 
that had provoked his demonstration. He was 
dead to every emotion except revenge — to ac- 
complish which he was returning. 



74 THE GLORY OF THE TRENCHES 

The moving-pictures still went on; nobody 
had the heart to see more of them. The house 
rose, fumbling for its coats and hats; the place 
was soon empty. 

Just as I was leaving a recruiting sergeant 
touched my elbow, " Going to enlist, sonny? " 

I shook my head. " Not to-night. Want to 
think it over." 

" You will," he said. " Don't wait too long. 
We can make a man of you. If I get you in my 
squad I'll give you hell." 

I didn't doubt it. 

I don't know that I'm telling these events in 
their proper sequence as they led up to the grow- 
ing of the vision. That doesn't matter — the 
point is that the conviction was daily strengthen- 
ing that I was needed out there. The thought 
was grotesque that I could ever make a soldier 
— I whose life from the day of leaving college 
had been almost wholly sedentary. In fights at 
school I could never hurt the other boy until by 
pain he had stung me into madness. Moreover, 
my idea of war was grimly graphic; I thought 
it consisted of a choice between inserting a bay- 
onet into some one else's stomach or being your- 
self the recipient. I had no conception of the 
long-distance, anonymous killing that marks our 
modern methods, and is in many respects more 



THE GLORY OF THE TRENCHES 75 

truly awful. It's a fact that there are hosts of 
combatants who have never once identified the 
bodies of those for whose death they are per- 
sonally responsible. My ideas of fighting were 
all of hand-to-hand encounters — the kind of 
bloody fighting that rejoiced the hearts of 
pirates. I considered that it took a brutal kind 
of man to do such work. For myself I felt 
certain that, though I got the upper-hand of a 
fellow who had tried to murder me, I should 
never have the callousness to return the com- 
pliment. The thought of shedding blood was 
nauseating. 

It was partly to escape from this atmosphere 
of tension that we left London, and set out on 
a motor-trip through England. This trip had 
figured largely in our original plans before there 
had been any thought of war. We wanted to 
re-visit the old places that had been the scenes 
of our family-life and childhood. Months be- 
fore sailing out of Quebec we had studied guide- 
books, mapping out routes and hotels. With 
about half a ton of gasolene on the roof to guard 
against contingencies, we started. 

Everywhere we went, from Cornwall to the 
North, men were training and marching. All 
the bridges and reservoirs were guarded. Every 
tiniest village had its recruiting posters for 



76 THE GLORY OF THE TRENCHES 

Kitchener's Army. It was a trip utterly differ- 
ent from the one we had expected. 

At Stratford in the tap-room of Shakespeare's 
favourite tavern I met an exceptional person 
— a man who was afraid, and had the courage 
to speak the truth as millions at that time felt 
it. An American was present — a vast and 
fleshy man: a transatlantic version of Falstaff. 
He had just escaped from Paris and was giving 
us an account of how he had hired a car, had 
driven as near the fighting-line as he could get 
and had seen the wounded coming out. He had 
risked the driver's life and expended large sums 
of money merely to gratify his curiosity. He 
mopped his brow and told us that he had aged 
ten years — folks in Philadelphia would hardly 
know him ; but it was all worth it. The details 
which he embroidered and dwelt upon were 
ghastly. He was particularly impressed with 
having seen a man with his nose off. His de- 
scription held us horrified and spell-bound. 

In the midst of his oratory an officer entered, 
bringing with him five nervous young fellows. 
They were self-conscious, excited, over-wrought 
and belonged to the class of the lawyer's clerk. 
The officer had evidently been working them up 
to the point of enlistment, and hoped to com- 
plete the job that evening over a sociable glass. 



THE GLORY OF THE TRENCHES yj 
As his audience swelled, the fat man from Phila- 
delphia grew exceedingly vivid. When appealed 
to by the recruiting officer, he confirmed the 
opinion that every Englishman of fighting age 
should be in France; that's where the boys of 
America would be if their country were in the 
same predicament. Four out of the five in- 
tended victims applauded this sentiment — they 
applauded too boisterously for complete sin- 
cerity, because they felt that they could do no 
less. The fifth, a scholarly, pale-faced fellow, 
drew attention to himself by his silence. 

"You're going to join, too, aren't you?" the 
recruiting officer asked. 

The pale-faced man swallowed. There was 
no doubt that he was scared. The American's 
morbid details had been enough to frighten any- 
body. He was so frightened that he had the 
pluck to tell the truth. 

"Fd like to," he hesitated, "but . Fve 

got an imagination. I should see things as twice 
as horrible. I should live through every beastli- 
ness before it occurred. When it did happen, I 
should turn coward. I should run away, and 
you'd shoot me as a deserter. Fd like — not 
yet, I can't." 

He was the bravest man in the tap-room that 
night. If he's still alive, he probably wears 



78 THE GLORY OF THE TRENCHES 

decorations. He was afraid, just as every one 
else was afraid; but he wasn't sufficiently a 
coward to lie about his terror. His voice was 
the voice of millions at that hour. 

A day came when England's jeopardy was 
brought home to her. I don't remember the 
date, but I remember it was a Sabbath. We had 
pulled up before a village post office to get the 
news; it was pasted behind the window against 
the glass. We read, "Boulogne has fallen." 
The news was false; but it wasn't contradicted 
till next day. Meanwhile, in that quiet village, 
over and above the purring of the engine, we 
heard the beat of Death's wings across the 
Channel — a gigantic vulture approaching which 
would pick clean of vileness the bones of both 
the actually and the spiritually dead. I knew 
then for certain that it was only a matter of 
time till I, too, should be out there among the 
carnage, " somewhere in France." I felt like 
a rabbit in the last of the standing corn, when a 
field is in the harvesting. There was no escape 
— I could hear the scythes of an inexorable duty 
cutting closer. 

After about six weeks in England, I travelled 
back to New York with my family to complete 
certain financial obligations and to set about the 
winding up of my affairs. I said nothing to 



THE GLORY OF THE TRENCHES 79 

any one as to my purpose. The reason for my 
silence is now obvious: I didn't want to commit 
myself to other people and wished to leave my- 
self a loop-hole for retracting the promises I had 
made my conscience. There were times when 
my heart seemed to stop beating, appalled by the 
future which I was rapidly approaching. My 
vivid imagination — which from childhood has 
been as much a hindrance as a help — made me 
foresee myself in every situation of horror — 
gassed, broken, distributed over the landscape. 
Luckily it made me foresee the worst horror — 
the ignominy of living perhaps fifty years with 
a self who was dishonoured and had sunk be- 
neath his own best standards. Of course there 
were also moments of exaltation when the boy- 
spirit of adventure loomed large; it seemed 
splendidly absurd that I was going to be a soldier, 
a companion-in-arms of those lordly chaps who 
had fought at Senlac, sailed with Drake and 
saved the day for freedom at Mons. Whether 
I was exalted or depressed, a power stronger 
than myself urged me to work feverishly to the 
end that, at the first opportunity, I might lay 
aside my occupation, with all my civilian obliga- 
tions discharged. 

When that time came, my first difficulty was 
in communicating my decision to my family ; my 



8o THE GLORY OF THE TRENCHES 

second, in getting accepted in Canada. I was 
perhaps more ignorant than most people about 
things mihtary. I had not the shghtest knowl- 
edge as to the functions of the different arms of 
the service; infantry, artillery, engineers, A. S. 
C. — they all connoted just as much and as 
little. I had no qualifications. I had never 
handled fire-arms. My solitary useful accom- 
plishment was that I could ride a horse. It 
seemed to me that no man ever was less fitted 
for the profession of killing. I was painfully con- 
scious of self-ridicule whenever I offered myself 
for the job. I offered myself several times and 
in different quarters ; when at last I was granted 
a commission in the Canadian Field Artillery it 
was by pure good-fortune. I didn't even know 
what guns were used and, if informed, shouldn't 
have had the least idea what an eighteen-pounder 
was. Nevertheless, within seven months I was 
out in France, taking part in an offensive which, 
up to that time, was the most ambitious of the 
entire war. 

From New York I went to Kingston in 
Ontario to present myself for training; an of- 
ficers' class had just started, in which I had been 
ordered to enrol myself. It was the depth of 
winter — an unusually hard winter even for that 
part of Canada. My first glimpse of the Tete du 



THE GLORY OF THE TRENCHES 8i 

Pont Barracks was of a square of low buildings, 
very much like the square of a Hudson Bay Fort. 
The parade ground was ankle-deep in trampled 
snow and mud. A bleak wind was blowing from 
off the river. Squads of embryo officers were 
being drilled by hoarse-voiced sergeants. The 
officers looked cold, and cowed, and foolish; the 
sergeants employed ruthlessly the age-old army 
sarcasms and made no effort to disguise their dis- 
gust for these officers and " temporary gentle- 
men." 

I was directed to an office where a captain sat 
writing at a desk, while an orderly waited rigidly 
at attention. The captain looked up as I entered, 
took in my spats and velour hat with an impatient 
glance, and continued with his writing. When I 
got an opportunity I presented my letter ; he read 
it through irritably. 

" Any previous military experience? " 

" None at all." 

" Then how d'you expect to pass out with this 
class? It's been going for nearly two weeks 
already? " 

Again, as though he had dismissed me from 
his mind, he returned to his writing. From a 
military standpoint I knew that I was justly a 
figure of naught; but I also felt that he was rub- 
bing it in a trifle hard. I was too recent a recruit 



S2 THE GLORY OF THE TRENCHES 

to have lost my civilian self-respect. At last, 
after a period of embarrassed silence, I asked, 
" What am I to do? To whom do I report? " 

Without looking up he told me to report on the 
parade ground at six o'clock the following morn- 
ing. When I got back to my hotel, I reflected on 
the chilliness of my reception. I had taken no 
credit to myself for enlisting — I knew that I 
ought to have joined months before. But six 
o'clock! I glanced across at the station, where 
trains were pulling out for New York; for a 
moment I was tempted. But not for long; I 
couldn't trust the hotel people to wake me, so I 
went out and purchased an alarm clock. 

That night I didn't sleep much. I was up and 
dressed by five-thirty. I hid beneath the shadow 
of a wall near the barracks and struck matches 
to look at my watch. At ten minutes to six the 
street was full of unseen, hurrying feet which 
sounded ghostly in the darkness. I followed 
them into the parade-ground. The parade was 
falling in, rolls were being called by the aid of 
flash-lamps. I caught hold of an officer; for all 
I knew he might have been a General or Colonel. 
I asked his advice, when I had blundered out my 
story. He laughed and said I had better return 
to my hotel; the class was going to stables and 



THE GLORY OF THE TRENCHES 83 

there was no one at that hour to whom I could re- 
port. 

The words of the sergeant at the Empire came 
back to me, " And I'll give you hell if I get you 
in my squad." I understood then: this was the 
first attempt of the Army to break my heart — an 
attempt often repeated and an attempt for which, 
from my present point of vantage, I am intensely 
grateful. In those days the Canadian Overseas 
Forces were comprised of volunteers; it wasn't 
sufficient to express a tepid willingness to die for 
your country — you had to prove yourself deter- 
mined and eligible for death through your power 
to endure hardship. 

When I had been medically examined, passed 
as fit, had donned a uniform and commenced my 
training, I learnt what the enduring of hardship 
was. No experience on active service has 
equalled the humiliation and severity of those first 
months of soldiering. We were sneered at, 
cleaned stables, groomed horses, rode stripped 
saddle for twelve miles at the trot, attended lec- 
tures, studied till past midnight and were up on 
first parade at six o'clock. No previous civilian 
efficiency or prominence stood us in any stead. 
We started robbed of all importance, and only 
gained a new importance by our power to hang 



84 THE GLORY OF THE TRENCHES 

on and to develop a new efficiency as soldiers. 
When men " went sick " they were labelled scrim- 
shankers and struck off the course. It was an 
offence to let your body interfere with your duty ; 
if it tried to, you must ignore it. If a man 
caught cold in Kingston, what would he not catch 
in the trenches? Very many went down under 
the physical ordeal; of the class that started, I 
don't think more than a third passed. The luke- 
warm soldier and the pink-tea hero, who simply 
wanted to swank in a uniform, were effectually 
choked off. It was a test of pluck, even more 
than of strength or intelligence — the same test 
that a man would be subjected to all the time at 
the Front. In a word it sorted out the fellows 
who had " guts." 

" Guts " isn't a particularly polite word, but 
I have come increasingly to appreciate its 
splendid significance. The possessor of this 
much coveted quality is the kind of idiot who, 

" When his legs are smitten ofif 
Will fight upon his stumps." 

The Tommies, whom we were going to com- 
mand, would be like that; if we weren't like it, 
we wouldn't be any good as officers. This Ar- 
tillery School had a violent way of sifting out 
a man's moral worth; you hadn't much conceit 



THE GLORY OF THE TRENCHES 85 

left by the end of it. I had not felt myself so 
paltry since the day when I was left at my first 
boarding-school in knickerbockers. 

After one had qualified and been appointed to a 
battery, there was still difficulty in getting to 
England. I was lucky, and went over early with 
a draft of officers who had been cabled for as re- 
inforcements. I had been in England a bare 
three weeks when my name was posted as due to 
go to France. 

How did I feel? Nervous, of course, but also 
intensely eager. I may have been afraid of 
wounds and death — I don't remember; I was 
certainly nothing like as afraid as I had been 
before I wore uniform. My chief fear was 
that I would be afraid and might show it. Like 
the pale-faced chap in the tap-room at Stratford, 
I had fleeting glimpses of myself being shot as a 
deserter. 

At this point something happened which at 
least proved to me that I had made moral 
progress, I'd finished my packing and was doing 
a last rush round, when I caught in large letter- 
ing on a newsboard the heading, " peace 
RUMOURED." Before I realised what had hap- 
pened I was crying. I was furious with disap- 
pointment. If the war should end before I got 
there ! On buying a paper I assured my- 



86 THE GLORY OF THE TRENCHES 

self that such a disaster was quite improbable. 
I breathed again. Then the reproachful memory 
came of another occasion when I had been scared 
by a headline, "Boulogne Has Fallen." I had 
been scared lest I might be needed at that time; 
now I was panic-stricken lest I might arrive too 
late. There was a change in me; something 
deep-rooted had happened. I got to thinking 
about it. On that motor-trip through England 
I had considered myself in the light of a phil- 
anthropist, who might come to the help of the 
Allies and might not. Now all I asked was to be 
considered worthy to do my infinitesimal " bit." 
I had lost all my old conceits and hallucinations, 
and had come to respect myself in a very humble 
fashion not for what I was, but for the cause in 
which I was prepared to fight. The knowledge 
that I belonged to the physically fit contributed 
to this saner sense of pride; before I wore a uni- 
form I had had the morbid fear that I might not 
be up to standard. And then the uniform! It 
was the outward symbol of the lost selfishness 
and the cleaner honour. It hadn't been paid for ; 
it wouldn't be paid for till I had lived in the 
trenches. I was childishly anxious to earn my 
right to wear it. I had said " Good-bj^e " to my- 
self, and had been re-born into willing sacrifice. 
I think that was the reason for the difference of 



THE GLORY OF THE TRENCHES 87 

spirit in which I read the two headlines. We've 
all gone through the same spiritual gradations, 
we men who have got to the Front. None of us 
know how to express our conversion. All we 
know is that from being little circumscribed 
egoists, we have swamped our identities in a 
magnanimous crusade. The venture looked fatal 
at first; but in losing the whole world we have 
gained our own souls. 

On a beautiful day in late summer I sailed for 
France. England faded out like a dream be- 
hind. Through the haze in mid-Channel a hospi- 
tal ship came racing; on her sides were blazoned 
the scarlet cross. The next time I came to Eng- 
land I might travel on that racing ship. The 
truth sounded like a lie. It seemed far more true 
that I was going on my annual pleasure trip to the 
lazy cities of romance. 

The port at which we disembarked was cheery 
and almost normal. One saw a lot of khaki 
mingling with sky-blue tiger-men of France. 
Apart from that one would scarcely have guessed 
that the greatest war in the world's history was 
raging not more than fifty miles away. I slept 
the night at a comfortable hotel on the quay- 
side. There was no apparent shortage ; I got 
everything that I required. Next day I boarded 
a train which, I was told, would carry me to the 



88 THE GLORY OF THE TRENCHES 

Front. We puffed along in a leisurely sort of 
way. The engineer seemed to halt whenever he 
had a mind; no matter where he halted, grubby 
children miraculously appeared and ran along the 
bank, demanding from Monsieur Engleeshman 
" ceegarettes " and " beescuits." Towards even- 
ing we pulled up at a little town where we had 
a most excellent meal. No hint of war yet. 
Night came down and we found that our carriage 
had no lights. It must have been nearing dawn, 
when I was wakened by the distant thunder of 
guns. I crouched in my corner, cold and 
cramped, trying to visualise the terror of it. I 
asked myself whether I was afraid. " Not of 
Death," I told myself. " But of being afraid 
— yes, most horribly." 

At five o'clock we halted at a junction, where 
a troop-train from the Front was already at a 
standstill. Tommies in steel helmets and mud- 
died to the eyes were swarming out onto the 
tracks. They looked terrible men with their 
tanned cheeks and haggard eyes. I felt how im- 
practical I was as I watched them — how ill- 
suited for campaigning. They were making the 
most of their respite from travelling. Some 
were building little fires between the ties to do 
their cooking — their utensils were bayonets and 
old tomato cans; others were collecting water 



THE GLORY OF THE TRENCHES 89 

from the exhaust of an engine and shaving. I 
had already tried to purchase food and had 
failed, so I copied their example and set about 
shaving. 

Later in the day we passed gangs of Hun 
prisoners — clumsy looking fellows, with flaxen 
hair and blue eyes, who seemed to be thanking 
God every minute with smiles that they were out 
of danger and on our side of the line. Late in 
the afternoon the engine jumped the rails; we 
were advised to wander off to a rest-camp, the 
direction of which was sketchily indicated. We 
found some Australians with a transport-wagon 
and persuaded them to help us with our baggage. 
It had been pouring heavily, but the clouds had 
dispersed and a rainbow spanned the sky. I took 
it for a sign. 

After trudging about six miles, we arrived at 
the camp and found that it was out of food and 
that all the tents were occupied. We stretched 
our sleeping-bags on the ground and went to bed 
supperless. We had had no food all day. Next 
morning we were told that we ought to jump an 
ammunition-lorry, if we wanted to get any 
further on our journey. Nobody seemed to want 
Us particularly, and no one could give us the least 
information as to where our division was. It 
was another lesson, if that were needed, of our 



90 THE GLORY OF THE TRENCHES 

total unimportance. While we were waiting on 
the roadside, an Australian brigade of artillery 
passed by. The men's faces were dreary with 
fatigue; the gunners were dismounted and 
marched as in a trance. The harness was 
muddy, the steel rusty, the horses lean and dis- 
couraged. We understood that they were pull- 
ing out from an offensive in which they had re- 
ceived a bad cutting up. To my overstrained 
imagination it seemed that the men had the vision 
of death in their eyes. 

Presently we spotted a lorry-driver who had, 
what George Robey would call, " a kind and gen- 
erous face." We took advantage of him, for 
once having persuaded him to give us a lift, we 
froze onto him and made him cart us about the 
country all day. We kept him kind and gen- 
erous, I regret to say, by buying him wine at far 
too many estaminets. 

Towards evening the thunder of the guns had 
swelled into an ominous roar. We passed 
through villages disfigured by shell-fire. Civil- 
ians became more rare and more aged. Cattle 
disappeared utterly from the landscape; fields 
were furrowed with abandoned trenches, in front 
of which hung entanglements of wire. Mounted 
orderlies splashed along sullen roads at an im- 
patient trot. Here and there we came across im- 



THE GLORY OF THE TRENCHES 91 
provised bivouacs of infantry. Far away 
against the horizon towards which we travelled, 
Hun flares and rockets were going up. Hopeless 
stoicism, unutterable desolation — that was my 
first impression. 

The landscape was getting increasingly muddy 
— it became a sea of mud. Despatch-riders on 
motor-bikes travelled warily, with their feet 
dragging to save themselves from falling. 
Everything was splashed with filth and cor- 
ruption; one marvelled at the cleanness of the 
sky. Trees were blasted, and seemed to be sink- 
ing out of sight in this war-created Slough of 
Despond. We came to the brow of a hill ; in the 
valley was something that I recognised. The 
last time I had seen it was in an etching in a 
shop window in Newark, New Jersey. It was 
a town, from the midst of whose battered ruins 
a splintered tower soared against the sky. Lean- 
ing far out from the tower, so that it seemed she 
must drop, was a statue of the Virgin with the 
Christ in her arms. It was a superstition with 
the French, I remembered, that so long as she 
did not fall, things would go well with the Allies. 
As we watched, a shell screamed over the gap- 
ing roofs and a column of smoke went up. 
Gehenna, being blessed by the infant Jesus — 
that was what I saw. 



92 THE GLORY OF THE TRENCHES 

As we entered the streets, Tommies more 
polluted than miners crept out from the skeletons 
of houses. They leant listlessly against sagging 
doorways to watch us pass. If we asked for 
information as to where our division was, they 
shook their heads stupidly, too indifferent with 
weariness to reply. We found the Town 
Mayor; all that he could tell us was that 
our division wasn't here yet, but was expected 
any day — probably it was still on the line of 
march. Our lorry-driver was growing im- 
patient. We wrote him out a note which would 
explain his wanderings, got him to deposit us 
near a Y. M. C. A. tent, and bade him an un- 
cordial " Good-bye." For the next three nights 
we slept by our wits and got our food by forag- 
ing. 

There was a Headquarters near by whose 
battalion was in the line. I struck up a liaison 
with its officers, and at times went into the 
crowded tent, which was their mess, to get warm. 
Runners would come there at all hours of the 
day and night, bringing messages from the 
Front. They were usually well spent. Some- 
times they had been gassed ; but they all had the 
invincible determination to carry on. After they 
had delivered their message, they would lie down 
in the mud and go to sleep like dogs. The 



THE GLORY OF THE TRENCHES 93 

moment the reply was ready, they would lurch to 
their feet, throwing off their weariness, as though 
it were a thing to be conquered and despised. I 
appreciated now, as never before, the lesson of 
" guts " that I had been taught at Kingston. 

There was one officer at Battalion Headquar- 
ters who, whenever I entered, was always writ- 
ing, writing, writing. What he was writing I 
never enquired — perhaps letters to his sweet- 
heart or wife. It didn't matter how long I 
stayed, he never seemed to have the time to look 
up. He was a Highlander — a big man with a 
look of fate in his eyes. His hair was black ; his 
face stern, and set, and extremely white. I re- 
member once seeing him long after midnight 
through the raised flap of the tent. All his 
brother officers were asleep, huddled like sacks 
impersonally on the floor. At the table in the 
centre he sat, his head bowed in his hands, the 
light from the lamp spilling over his neck and 
forehead. He may have been praying. He re- 
called to my mind the famous picture of The 
Last Sleep of Arg}de. From that moment I had 
the premonition that he would not live long. A 
month later I learnt that he had been killed on 
his next trip into the trenches. 

After three days of waiting my division ar- 
rived and I was attached to a battery. I had 



94 THE GLORY OF THE TRENCHES 

scarcely had time to make the acquaintance of my 
new companions, when we pulled into my first 
attack. 

We hooked in at dawn and set out through a 
dense white mist. The mist was wet and miser- 
able, but excellent for our purpose; it prevented 
us from being spotted by enemy balloons and 
aeroplanes. We made all the haste that was 
possible; but in places the roads were blocked by 
other batteries moving into new positions. We 
passed through the town above which the Virgin 
floated with the infant Jesus in her arms. One 
wondered whether she was really holding him out 
to bless; her attitude might equally have been 
that of one who was flinging him down into the 
shambles, disgusted with this travesty on reli- 
gion. 

The other side of the town the ravages of war 
were far more marked. All the way along the 
roadside were clumps of little crosses, French, 
English, German, planted above the hurried 
graves of the brave fellows who had fallen. 
Ambulances were picking their way warily, re- 
turning with the last night's toll of wounded. 
We saw newly dead men and horses, pulled to 
one side, who had been caught in the darkness 
by the enemy's harassing fire. In places the 
country had holes the size of quarries, where 



THE GLORY OF THE TRENCHES 95 

mines had exploded and shells from large calibre 
guns had detonated. Bedlam was raging up 
front; shells went screaming over us, seeking 
out victims in the back-country. To have been 
tliere by oneself would have been most disturb- 
ing, but the men about me seemed to regard it as 
perfectly ordinary and normal. I steadied my- 
self by their example. 

We came to a point where our Major was wait- 
ing for us, turned out of the road, followed him 
down a grass slope and so into a valley. Here 
gun-pits were in the process of construction. 
Guns were unhooked and man-handled into their 
positions, and the teams sent back to the wagon- 
lines. All day we worked, both officers and 
men, with pick and shovel. Towards evening we 
had completed the gun-platforms and made a 
beginning on the overhead cover. We had had 
no time to prepare sleeping-quarters, so spread 
our sleeping-bags and blankets in the caved-in 
trenches. About seven o'clock, as we were rest- 
ing, the evening " hate " commenced. In those 
days the evening " hate " was a regular habit 
with the Hun. He knew our country better 
than we did, for he had retired from it. Every 
evening he used to search out all communication 
trenches and likely battery-positions with any 
quantity of shells. His idea was to rob us of 



96 THE GLORY OF THE TRENCHES 

our morale. I wish he might have seen how 
abysmally he failed to do it. Down our narrow 
valley, like a flight of arrows, the shells screamed 
and whistled. Where they struck, the ground 
looked like Resurrection Day with the dead el- 
bowing their way into daylight and forcing back 
the earth from their eyes. There were actually 
many dead just beneath the surface and, as the 
ground was ploughed up, the smell of corruption 
became distinctly unpleasant. Presently the 
shells began to go dud ; we realised that they were 
gas-shells. A thin, bluish vapour spread through- 
out the valley and breathing became oppressive. 
Then like stallions, kicking in their stalls, the 
heavy guns on the ridge above us opened. It 
was fine to hear them stamping their defiance ; it 
made one want to get to grips with his ag- 
gressors. In the brief silences one could hear 
our chaps laughing. The danger seemed to fill 
them with a wild excitement. Every time a 
shell came near and missed them, they would 
taunt the unseen Huns for their poor gunnery, 
giving what they considered the necessary cor- 
rections : " Five minutes more left, old Cock. 
If you'd only drop fifty, you'd get us." These 
men didn't know what fear was — or, if they did, 
they kept it to themselves. And these were the 
chaps whom I was to order. 



THE GLORY OF THE TRENCHES 97 

A few days later my Major told me that I was 
to be ready at 3 130 next morning to accompany 
him up front to register the guns. In registering 
guns you take a telephonist and linesmen with 
you. They lay in a line from the battery to any 
point you may select as the best from which to 
observe the enemy's country. This point may be 
two miles or more in advance of your battery. 
Your battery is always hidden and out of sight, 
for fear the enemy should see the flash of the fir- 
ing; consequently the officer in charge of the bat- 
tery lays the guns mathematically, but cannot 
observe the effect of his shots. The officer who 
goes forward can see the target; by telephoning 
back his corrections, he makes himself the eyes of 
the officer at the gims. 

It had been raining when we crept out of our 
kennels to go forward. It seems unnecessary to 
state that it had been raining, for it always has 
been raining at the Front. I don't remember 
what degree of mud we had attained. We have 
a variety of adjectives, and none of them polite, 
to describe each stage. The worst of all is what 
we call "God-Awful Mud." I don't think it 
was as bad as that, but it was bad enough. 
Everything was dim, and clammy, and spectral. 
At the hour of dawn one isn't at his bravest. It 
was like walking at the bottom of the sea, only 



98 THE GLORY OF THE TRENCHES 

things that were thrown at you travelled faster. 
We struck a sloppy road, along which ghostly 
figures passed, with ground sheets flung across 
their head and shoulders, like hooded monks. 
At a point where scarlet bundles were being 
lifted into ambulances, we branched overland. 
Here and there from all directions, infantry were 
converging, picking their way in single file to 
reduce their casualties if a shell burst near them. 
The landscape, the people, the early morning — 
everything was stealthy and walked with muted 
steps. 

We entered a trench. Holes were scooped 
out in the side of it just large enough to shelter 
a man crouching. Each hole contained a sleep- 
ing soldier who looked as dead as the occupant 
of a catacomb. Some of the holes had been 
blown in ; all you saw of the late occupant was 
a protruding arm or leg. At best there was a 
horrid similarity between the dead and the living. 
It seemed that the walls of the trenches had been 
built out of corpses, for one recognised the uni- 
forms of French men and Huns. They were 
built out of them, though whether by design or 
accident it was impossible to tell. We came to 
a group of men, doing some repairing; that part 
of the trench had evidently been strafed last 
night. They didn't know where they were, or 



THE GLORY OF THE TRENCHES 99 

how far it was to the front-line. We wandered 
on, still laying in our wire. The Colonel of our 
Brigade joined us and we waded on together. 

The enemy shelling was growing more intense, 
as was always the way on the Somme when we 
were bringing out our wounded. A good many 
of our trenches were directly enfilade; shells 
burst just behind the parapet, when they didn't 
burst on it. It was at about this point in my 
breaking-in that I received a blow on the head — 
and thanked God for the man who invented the 
steel helmet. 

Things were getting distinctly curious. We 
hadn't passed any infantry for some time. The 
trenches were becoming each minute more shal- 
low and neglected. Suddenly we found our- 
selves in a narrow furrow which was packed with 
our own dead. They had been there for some 
time and were partly buried. They were sitting 
up or lying forward in every attitude of agony. 
Some of them clasped their wounds; some of 
them pointed with their hands. Their faces had 
changed to every colour and glared at us like 
swollen bruises. Their helmets were off; with 
a pitiful, derisive neatness the rain had parted 
their hair. 

We had to crouch low because the trench was 
so shallow. It was difficult not to disturb them; 



loo THE GLORY OF THE TRENCHES 

the long skirts of our trench-coats brushed 
against their faces. 

All of a sudden we halted, making ourselves as 
small as could be. In the rapidly thinning mist 
ahead of us, men were moving. They were 
stretcher-bearers. The odd thing was that they 
were carrying their wounded away from, instead 
of towards us. Then it flashed on us that they 
were Huns. We had wandered into No Man's 
Land. Almost at that moment we must have 
been spotted, for shells commenced falling at 
the end of the trench by which we had entered. 
Spreading out, so as not to attract attention, we 
commenced to crawl towards the other end. In- 
stantly that also was closed to us and a curtain 
of shells started dropping behind us. We were 
trapped. With perfect coolness — a coolness 
which, whatever I looked, I did not share — we 
went down on our hands and knees, wriggling 
our way through the corpses and shell-holes in 
the direction of where our front-line ought to 
be. After what seemed an age, we got back. 
Later we registered the guns, and one of our 
officers who had been laying in wire, was killed 
in the process. His death, like everything else, 
was regarded without emotion as being quite 
ordinary. 

On the way out, when we had come to a part 



THE GLORY OF THE TRENCHES loi 

of our journey where the tension was relaxed 
and we could be less cautious, I saw a signalling 
officer lying asleep under a blackened tree. I 
called my Major's attention to him, saying, 
" Look at that silly ass, sir. He'll get something 
that he doesn't want if he lies there much longer." 

My Major turned his head, and said briefly, 
" Poor chap, he's got it." 

Then I saw that his shoulder-blade had burst 
through his tunic and was protruding. He'd 
been coming out, walking freely and feeling that 
the danger was over, just as we were, when the 
unlucky shell had caught him. " His name must 
have been written on it," our men say when 
that happens. I noticed that he had black boots ; 
since then nothing would persuade me to wear 
black boots in the trenches. 

This first experience in No Man's Land did 
away with my last flabby fear — that, if I was 
afraid, I would show it. One is often afraid. 
Any soldier who asserts the contrary may not be 
a liar, but he certainly does not speak the truth. 
Physical fear is too deeply rooted to be over- 
come by any amount of training ; it remains, then, 
to train a man in spiritual pride, so that when he 
fears, nobody knows it. Cowardice is conta- 
gious. It has been said that no battalion is 
braver than its least brave member. Military 



I02 THE GLORY OF THE TRENCHES 

courage is, therefore, a form of unselfishness; 
it is practised that it may save weaker men's 
lives and uphold their honour. The worst thing 
you can say of a man at the Front is, " He doesn't 
play the game." That doesn't of necessity mean 
that he fails to do his duty ; what it means is that 
he fails to do a little bit more than his duty. 

When a man plays the game, he does things 
which it requires a braver man than himself to 
accomplish; he never knows when he's done; he 
acknowledges no limit to his cheerfulness and 
strength; whatever his rank, he holds his life 
less valuable than that of the humblest ; he laughs 
at danger not because he does not dread it, but 
because he has learnt that there are ailments more 
terrible and less curable than death. 

The men in the ranks taught me whatever I 
know about playing the game. I learnt from 
their example. In acknowledging this, I own 
up to the new equality, based on heroic values, 
which this war has established. The only man 
who counts " out there " is the man who is suffi- 
ciently self-effacing to show courage. The chaps 
who haven't done it are the exceptions. 

At the start of the war there were a good 
many persons whom we were apt to think of as 
common and unclean. But social distinctions are 
a wash-out in the trenches. We have seen St. 



THE GLORY OF THE TRENCHES 103 

Peter's vision, and have heard the voice, 
" What God hath cleansed, that call not thou 
common." 

Until I became a part of the war, I was a 
doubter of nobility in others and a sceptic as 
regards myself. The growth of my personal 
vision was complete when I recognised that the 
capacity of heroism is latent in everybody, and 
only awaits the bigness of the opportunity to call 
it out. 



THE GLORY OF THE TRENCHES 

We were too proud to live for years 

When our poor death could dry the tears 

Of little children yet unborn. 

It scarcely mattered that at morn, 

When manhood's hope was at its height. 

We stopped a bullet in mid-flight. 

It did not trouble us to lie 

Forgotten 'neath the forgetting sky. 

So long Sleep was our only cure 

That when Death piped of rest made sure. 

We cast our fleshly crutches down, 

Laughing like boys in Hamelin Town. 

And this we did while loving life. 

Yet loving more than home or wife 

The kindness of a world set free 

For countless children yet to be. 



Ill 

GOD AS WE SEE HIM 

For some time before I was wounded, we had 
been in very hot places. We could scarcely ex- 
pect them to be otherwise, for we had put on 
show after show. A " show " in our language, 
I should explain, has nothing in common with a 
theatrical performance, though it does not lack 
drama. We make the term apply to any method 
of irritating the Hun, from a trench-raid to a 
big offensive. The Hun was decidedly annoyed. 
He had very good reason. We were occupying 
the dug-outs which he had spent two years in 
building with French civilian labour. His U- 
boat threats had failed. He had offered us the 
olive-branch, and his peace terms had been re- 
jected with a peal of guns all along the Western 
Front. He had shown his disapproval of us by 
paying particular attention to our batteries; as 
a consequence our shell-dressings were all used 
up, having gone out with the gentlemen on 
stretchers who were contemplating a vacation in 

105 



io6 THE GLORY OF THE TRENCHES 

Blighty. We couldn't get enough to re-place 
them. There was a hitch somewhere. The de- 
mand for shell-dressings exceeded the supply. 
So I got on my horse one Sunday and, with my 
groom accompanying me, rode into the back- 
country to see if I couldn't pick some up at va- 
rious Field Dressing Stations and Collecting 
Points. 

In the course of my wanderings I came to a 
cathedral city. It was a city which was and still 
is beautiful, despite the constant bombardments. 
The Huns had just finished hurling a few more 
tons of explosives into it as I and my groom en- 
tered. The streets were deserted; it might have 
been a city of the dead. There was no sound, 
except the ringing iron of our horses' shoes on 
the cobble pavement. Here and there we came 
to what looked like a barricade w^hich barred our 
progress; actually it was the piled-up walls and 
rubbish of buildings which had collapsed. From 
cellars, now and then, faces of women, children 
and ancient men peered out — they were sharp 
and pointed like rats. One's imagination went 
back five hundred years — everything seemed 
mediaeval, short-lived and brutal. This might 
have been Limoges after the Black Prince had 
finished massacring its citizens; or it might have 
been Paris, when the wolves came down and 



THE GLORY OF THE TRENCHES 107 

Frangois Villon tried to find a lodging for the 
night. 

I turned up through narrow alleys where grass 
was growing and found myself, almost by acci- 
dent, in a garden. It was a green and spacious 
garden, with fifteen-foot walls about it and 
flowers which scattered themselves broadcast in 
neglected riot. We dismounted and tied our 
horses. Wandering along its paths, we came 
across little summer-houses, statues, fountains 
and then, without any hindrance, found ourselves 
in the nave of a fine cathedral which was roofed 
only by the sky. Two years of the Huns had 
made it as much a ruin as Tintern Abbey. Here, 
too, the flowers had intruded. They grew be- 
tween graves in the pavement and scrambled up 
the walls, wherever they could find a foothold. 
At the far end of this stretch of destruction stood 
the high altar, totally untouched by the hurricane 
of shell-fire. The saints were perched in their 
niches, composed and stately. The Christ looked 
down from His cross, as he had done for centu- 
ries, sweeping the length of splendid architecture 
with sad eyes. It seemed a miracle that the altar 
had been spared, when everything else had fallen. 
A reason is given for its escape. Every Sabbath 
since the start of the war, no matter how severe 
the bombardment, service has been held there. 



io8 THE GLORY OF THE TRENCHES 

The thin-faced women, rat-faced children and 
ancient men have crept out from their cellars and 
gathered about the priest; the lamp has been lit, 
the Host uplifted. The Hun is aware of this; 
with malice aforethought he lands shells into the 
cathedral every Sunday in an effort to smash the 
altar. So far he has failed. One finds in this 
a symbol — that in the heart of the maelstrom 
of horror, which this war has created, there is 
a quiet place where the lamp of gentleness and 
honour is kept burning. The Hun will have to 
do a lot more shelling before he puts the lamp 
of kindness out. From the polluted trenches of 
Vimy the poppies spring up, blazoning abroad in 
vivid scarlet the heroism of our lads' willing sac- 
rifice. All this April, high above the shouting of 
our guns, the larks sang joyously. The scarlet 
of the poppies, the song of the larks, the lamp 
shining on the altar are only external signs of 
the unconquerable, happy religion which lies hid- 
den in the hearts of our men. Their religion is 
the religion of heroism, which they have learnt 
in the glory of the trenches. 

There was a line from William Morris's 
Earthly Paradise which used to hauTit me, es- 
pecially in the early days when I was first 
experiencing what war really meant. Since re- 
turning for a brief space to where books are ac- 



THE GLORY OF THE TRENCHES 109 

cessible, I have looked up the quotation. It reads 
as follows : — 

" Of Heaven or Hell I have no power to sing, 
I cannot ease the burden of your fears 
Or make quick-coming death a little thing." 

It is the last line that makes me smile rather 
quietly, " Or make quick-coming death a little 
thing." I smile because the souls who wear 
khaki have learnt to do just that. Morris goes 
on to say that all he can do to make people happy 
is to tell them deathless stories about heroes who 
have passed into the world of the imagination, 
and, because of that, are immune from death. 
He calls himself " the idle singer of an empty 
day." How typical he is of the days before the 
M'ar when people had only pin-pricks to endure, 
and, consequently, didn't exert themselves to be 
brave! A big sacrifice, which bankrupts one's 
life, is always more bearable than the little inevi- 
table annoyances of sickness, disappointment and 
dying in a bed. It's easier for Christ to go to 
Calvary than for an on-looker to lose a night's 
sleep in the garden. When the world went well 
with us before the war, we were doubters. 
Nearly all the fiction of the past fifteen years is 
a proof of that — it records our fear of failure, 
sex, old age and particularly of a God who re- 



no THE GLORY OF THE TRENCHES 

fuses to explain Himself. Now, when we have 
thrust the world, affections, Hfe itself behind 
us and gaze hourly into the eyes of Death, belief 
comes as simply and clearly as it did when we 
were children. Curious and extraordinary! 
The burden of our fears has slipped from our 
shoulders in our attempt to do something for 
others; the unbelievable and long coveted miracle 
has happened — at last to every soul who has 
grasped his chance of heroism quick-coming death 
has become a fifth-rate calamity. 

In saying this I do not mean to glorify war; 
war can never be anything but beastly and 
damnable. It dates back to the jungle. But 
there are two kinds of war. There's the kind 
that a highwayman wages, when he pounces from 
the bushes and assaults a defenceless woman; 
there's the kind you wage when you go to her 
rescue. The highwayman can't expect to come 
out of the fight with a loftier morality — you 
can. Our chaps never wanted to fight. They 
hate fighting; it's that hatred of the thing they 
are compelled to do that makes them so terrible. 
The last thought to enter their heads four years 
ago was that to-day they would be in khaki. 
They had never been trained to the use of arms; 
a good many of them conceived of themselves as 
cowards. They entered the war to defend 



THE GLORY OF THE TRENCHES iii 

rather than to destroy. They Hterally put behind 
them houses, brethren, sisters, father, mother, 
wife, children, lands for the Kingdom of Heav- 
en's sake, though they would be the last to express 
themselves in that fashion. 

At a cross-road at the bottom of a hill, on the 
way to a gun-position we once had, stood a Cal- 
vary — one of those wayside altars, so frequently 
met in France, with pollarded trees surrounding 
it and an image of Christ in His agony. Pious 
peasants on their journey to market or as they 
worked in the fields, had l>een accustomed to raise 
their e3^es to it and cross themselves. It had 
comforted them with the knowledge of protec- 
tion. The road leading back from it and up the 
hill was gleaming white — a direct enfilade for 
the Hun, and always under observation. He 
kept guns trained on it ; at odd intervals, any hour 
during the day or night, he would sweep it with 
shell-fire. The woods in the vicinity were 
blasted and blackened. It was the season for 
leaves and flowers, but there was no greenness. 
Whatever of vegetation had not been uprooted 
and buried, had been poisoned by gas. The 
atmosphere was vile with the odour of decaying 
flesh. In the early morning, if you passed by 
the Calvary, there was always some fresh trag- 
edy. The newly dead lay sprawled out against 



112 THE GLORY OF THE TRENCHES 

its steps, as though they had dragged themselves 
there in their last moments. H you looked along 
the road, all the glazed eyes seemed to stare 
towards it. " Lord, remember me when thou 
comest into thy Kingdom," they seemed to say. 
The wooden Christ gazed down on them from 
His cross, with a suffering which two thousand 
years ago he had shared. The terrible pity of 
His silence seemed to be telling them that they 
had become one with Him in their final sacrifice. 
They hadn't lived His life — far from it; un- 
knowingly they had died His death. That's a 
part of the glory of the trenches, that a man who 
has not been good, can crucify himself and hang 
beside Christ in the end. One wonders in what 
pleasant places those weary souls find rest. 

There was a second Calvar}^ — a heap of ruins. 
Nothing of the altar or trees, by which it had 
been surrounded, was left. The first time I 
passed it, I saw a foot protruding. The man 
might be wounded ; I climbed up to examine and 
pulled aside the debris. Beneath it I found, like 
that of one three weeks dead, the naked body of 
the Christ. The exploding shell had wrenched 
it from its cross. Aslant the face, with gratui- 
tous blasphemy, the crown of thorns was tilted. 

These two Calvaries picture for me the part 
that Christ is playing in the present war. He 



THE GLORY OF THE TRENCHES 113 

survives in the noble self-effacement of the men. 
He is re-crucified in the defilements that are 
v/rought upon their bodies. 

God as we see Him! And do we see Him? 
I think so, but not always consciously. He 
moves among us in the forms of our brother men. 
We see him most evidently when danger is most 
threatening and courage is at its highest. We 
don't often recognise Him out loud. Our chaps 
don't assert that they're His fellow-campaigners. 
They're too humble-minded and inarticulate for 
that. They're where they are because they want 
to do their "bit" — their duty. A carefully 
disguised instinct of honour brought them there. 
" Doing their bit " in Bible language means, lay- 
ing down their lives for their friends. After 
all they're not so far from Nazareth. 

"Doing their hit!" That covers everything. 
Here's an example of how God walks among us. 
In one of our attacks on the Somme, all the ob- 
servers up forward were uncertain as to what 
had happened. We didn't know whether our in- 
fantry had captured their objective, failed, or 
gone beyond it. The battlefield, as far as eye 
could reach, was a bath of mud. It is extremely 
easy in the excitement of an offensive, when all 
landmarks are blotted out, for our storming par- 
ties to lose their direction. If this happens, a 



1 14 THE GLORY OF THE TRENCHES 

number of dangers may result. A battalion may 
find itself "up in the air," which means that it 
has failed to connect with the battalions on its 
right and left; its flanks are then exposed to the 
enemy. It may advance too far, and start dig- 
ging itself in at a point where it was previously 
arranged that our artillery should place their pro- 
tective wall of fire. We, being up forward as 
artillery observers, are the eyes of the army. It 
is our business to watch for such contingencies, 
to keep in touch with the situation as it pro- 
gresses and to send our information back as 
quickly as possible. We were peering through 
our glasses from our point of vantage when, far 
away in the thickest of the battle-smoke, we saw 
a white flag wagging, sending back messages. 
The flag-wagging was repeated desperately; it 
was evident that no one had replied, and prob- 
able that no one had picked up the messages. A 
signaller who was with us, read the language for 
us. A company of infantry had advanced too 
far ; they were most of them wounded, very many 
of them dead, and they were in danger of being 
surrounded. They asked for our artillery to 
place a curtain of fire in front of them, and for 
reinforcements to be sent up. 

We at once 'phoned the orders through to our 
artillery and notified the Infantry headquarters of 



THE GLORY OF THE TRENCHES 115 

the division that was holding that front. But it 
was necessary to let those chaps know that we 
were aware of their predicament. They'd hang 
on if they knew that; otherwise . 

Without orders our signaller was getting his 
flags ready. If he hopped out of the trench 
onto the parapet, he didn't stand a fifty-fifty 
chance. The Hun was familiar with our ob- 
servation station and strafed it with persistent 
regularity. 

The signaller turned to the senior officer pres- 
ent, "What will I send them, sir?" 

" Tell them their messages have been received 
and that help is coming." 

Out the chap scrambled, a flag in either hand 
— he was nothing but a boy. He ran crouching 
like a rabbit to a hump of mud where his figure 
would show up against the sky. His flags com- 
menced wagging, " Messages received. Help 
coming." They didn't see him at first. He had 
to repeat the words. We watched him breath- 
lessly. We knew what would happen ; at last 
it happened. A Hun observer had spotted him 
and flashed the target back to his guns. All 
about him the mud commenced to leap and bub- 
ble. He went on signalling the good word to 
those stranded men up front, " Messages re- 
ceived. Help coming." At last they'd seen 



ii6 THE GLORY OF THE TRENCHES 

him. They were signaling, " O. K." It was 
at that moment that a whizz-bang lifted him off 
his feet and landed him all of a huddle. His 
" bit! " It was what he'd volunteered to do, 
when he came from Canada. The signalled " O. 
K." in the battlesmoke was like a testimony to 
his character. 

That's the kind of peep at God we get on the 
Western Front. It isn't a sad peep, either. 
When men die for something worth while death 
loses all its terror. It's petering out in bed from 
sickness or old age that's so horrifying. Many 
a man, whose cowardice is at loggerheads with 
his sense of duty, comes to the Front as a non- 
combatant; he compromises with his conscience 
and takes a bomb-proof job in some service 
whose place is well behind the lines. He doesn't 
stop there long, if he's a decent sort. Having 
learnt more than ever he guessed before about the 
brutal things that shell-fire can do to you, he 
transfers into a fighting unit. Why? Because 
danger doesn't appal; it allures. It holds a 
challenge. It stings one's pride. It urges one 
to seek out ascending scales of risk, just to prove 
to himself that he isn't flabby. The safe job is 
the only job for which there's no competition in 
fighting units. You have to persuade men to be 
grooms, or cooks, or batmen. If you're seeking 



THE GLORY OF THE TRENCHES 117 

volunteers for a chance at annihilation, you have 
to cast lots to avoid the offence of rejecting. All 
of this is inexplicable to civilians. I've heard 
them call the men at the Front " spiritual 
geniuses " — which sounds splendid, but means 
nothing. 

If civilian philosophers fail to explain us, we 
can explain them. In their world they are the 
centre of their universe. They look inward, in- 
stead of outward. The sun rises and sets to 
minister to their particular happiness. If they 
should die, the stars would vanish. We under- 
stand ; a few months ago we, too, were like that. 
What makes us reckless of death is our intense 
gratitude that we have altered. We want to 
prove to ourselves in excess how utterly we are 
changed from what we were. In his secret heart 
the egotist is a self-despiser. Can you imagine 
what a difference it works in a man after years 
of self -contempt, at least for one brief moment 
to approve of himself? Ever since we can re- 
member, we were chained to the prison-house of 
our bodies ; we lived to feed our bodies, to clothe 
our bodies, to preserve our bodies, to minister to 
their passions. Now we know that our bodies 
are mere flimsy shells, in which our souls are 
paramount. We can fling them aside any min- 
ute ; they become ignoble the moment the soul has 



ii8 THE GLORY OF THE TRENCHES 

departed. We have proof. Often at zero hour 
we have seen whole populations of cities go over 
the top and vanish, leaving behind them their 
bloody rags. We should go mad if we did not 
believe in immortality. We know that the phys- 
ical is not the essential part. How better can a 
man shake off his flesh than at the hour when his 
spirit is most shining? The exact day when he 
dies does not matter — to-morrow or fifty years 
hence. The vital concern is not when, but how. 
The civilian philosopher considers what we've 
lost. He forgets that it could never have been 
ours for long. In many cases it was misused 
and scarcely worth having while it lasted. Some 
of us were too weak to use it well. We might 
use it better now. We tuna from such thoughts 
and reckon up our gains. On the debit side we 
place ourselves as we were. We probably caught 
a train every morning — the same train, we went 
to a business where we sat at a desk. Neither 
the business nor the desk ever altered. We re- 
ceived the same strafing from the same employer ; 
or, if we were the employer, we administered 
the same strafing. We only did these things that 
we might eat bread; our dreams were all selfish 
— of more clothes, more respect, more food, 
bigger houses. The least part of the day we 
devoted to the people and the things we really 



THE GLORY OF THE TRENCHES 119 

cared for. And the people we loved — we 
weren't always nice to them. On the credit side 
we place ourselves as we are — doing a man's 
job, doing it for some one else, and unafraid to 
meet God. 

Before the war the word " ideals " had grown 
out-of-date and priggish — we had substituted 
for it the more robust word " ambitions." To- 
day ideals have come back to their place in our 
vocabulary. We have forgotten that we ever 
had ambitions, but at this moment men are drown- 
ing for ideals in the mud of Flanders. 

Nevertheless, it is true ; it isn't natural to be 
brave. How, then, have multitudes of men ac- 
quired this sudden knack of courage? They 
have been educated by the greatness of the oc- 
casion; when big sacrifices have been demanded, 
men have never been found lacking. And they 
have acquired it through, discipline and training. 

When you have subjected yourself to disci- 
pline, you cease to think of yourself; you are not 
you, but a part of a company of men. H y'ou 
don't do your duty, you throw the whole machine 
out. You soon learn the hard lesson that every 
man's life and every man's service belong to 
other people. Of this the organisation of an 
army is a vivid illustration. Take the infantry, 
for instance. They can't fight by themselves; 



I20 THE GLORY OF THE TRENCHES 

they're dependent on the support of the artillery. 
The artillery, in their turn, would be terribly 
crippled, were it not for the gallantry of the air 
service. If the infantry collapse, the guns have 
to go back; if the infantry advance, the guns 
have to be pulled forward. This close inter- 
dependence of service on service, division on di- 
vision, battalion on battery, follows right down 
through the army till it reaches the individual, 
so that each man feels that the day will be lost 
if he fails. His imagination becomes intrigued 
by the immensity of the stakes for which he plays. 
Any physical calamity which may happen to him- 
self becomes trifling when compared with the dis- 
grace he would bring upon his regiment if he 
were not courageous. 

A few months ago I was handing over a bat- 
tery-position in a fairly warm place. The major, 
who came up to take over from me, brought with 
him a subaltern and just enough men to run the 
guns. Within half-an-hour of their arrival, a 
stray shell came over and caught the subaltern 
and five of the gun-detachment. It was plain at 
once that the subaltern was dying — his name 
must have been written on the shell, as we say 
in France. We got a stretcher and made all 
haste to rush him out to a dressing-station. Just 



THE GLORY OF THE TRENCHES 121 

as he was leaving, he asked to speak with his 
major. "I'm so sorry, sir; I didn't mean to 
get wounded," he whispered. The last word he 
sent back from the dressing-station where he 
died, was, " Tell the major, I didn't mean to do 
it." That's discipline. He didn't think of him- 
self; all he thought of was that his major would 
be left short-handed. 

Here's another story, illustrating how merci- 
lessly discipline can restore a man to his higher 
self. Last spring, the night before an attack, 
a man was brought into a battalion headquarters 
dug-out, under arrest. The adjutant and Col- 
onel were busy attending to the last details of 
their preparations. The adjutant looked up 
irritably, 

"What is it?" 

The N. C. O. of the guard answered, " We 
found this man, sir, in a communication trench. 
His company has been in the front-line two 
hours. He was sitting down, with his equipment 
thrown away, and evidently had no intention of 
going up." 

The adjutant glanced coldly at the prisoner. 
" W^hat have you to say for yourself? " 

The man was ghastly white and shaking like 
an aspen. " Sir, I'm not the man I was since 



122 THE GLORY OF THE TRENCHES 

I saw my best friend, Jimmie, with his head 
blown off and lying in his hands. It's kind of 
got me. I can't face up to it." 

The adjutant was silent for a few seconds; 
then he said, " You know you have a double 
choice. You can either be shot up there, doing 
your duty, or behind the lines as a coward. It's 
for you to choose. I don't care." 

The intervaew was ended. He turned again 
to the Colonel. The man slowly straightened 
himself, saluted like a soldier and marched out 
alone to the Front. That's what discipline does 
for a man who's going back on himself. 

One of the big influences that helps to keep a 
soldier's soul sanitary is what is known in the 
British Army as " spit and polish." Directly 
we pull out for a rest, we start to work burnishing 
and washing. The chaps may have shown the 
most brilliant courage and self-sacrificing endur- 
ance, it counts for nothing if they're untidy. 
The first morning, no matter what are the 
weather conditions, we hold an inspection; every 
man has to show up with his chin shaved, hair 
cut, leather polished and buttons shining. If 
he doesn't he gets hell. 

There's a lot in it. You bring a man out from 
a tight corner where he's been in hourly contact 
with death; he's apt to think, " What's the use of 



THE GLORY OF THE TRENCHES 123 

taking pride in myself. I'm likely to be 'done 
in' any day. It'll be all the same when I'm 
dead." But if he doesn't keep clean in his body, 
he won't keep clean in his mind. The man who 
has his buttons shining brightly and his leather 
polished, is usually the man who is brightly pol- 
ished inside. Spit and polish teaches a man to 
come out of the trenches from seeing his pals 
killed, and to carry on as though nothing ab- 
normal had happened. It educates him in an 
impersonal attitude towards calamity which 
makes it bearable. It forces him not to regard 
anything too tragically. If you can stand aside 
from yourself and poke fun at your own tragedy 
— and tragedy always has its humorous aspect — 
that helps. The songs which have been inspired 
by the trenches are examples of this tendency. 

The last thing you find anybody singing " out 
there " is something patriotic; the last thing you 
find anybody reading is Rupert Brooke's poems. 
\A'hen men sing among the shell-holes they pre- 
fer a song which belittles their own heroism. 
Please picture to yourself a company of mud- 
stained scarecrows in steel-helmets, plodding 
their way under intermittent shelling through a 
battered trench, whistling and humming the fol- 
lowing splendid sentiments from The Plea of 
The Conscientious Objector: — 



124 THE GLORY OF THE TRENCHES 

" Send us the Army and the Navy. Send us the rank and 
file. 

Send us the grand old Territorials — they'll face the dan- 
ger with a smile. 

Where are the boys of the Old Brigade who made old 
England free? 

You may send my mother, my sister or my brother, 

But for Gawd's sake don't send me." 

They leave o£f whistling and humming to shout 
the last line. A shell falls near them — then 
another, then another. They crouch for a 
minute against the sticky walls to escape the fly- 
ing spray of death. Then they plod onward 
again through the mud whistling and humming, 
" But for Gawd's sake don't send me." They're 
probably a carrying party, taking up the rations 
to their pals. It's quite likely they'll have a bad 
time to-night — there's the smell of gas in the 
air. Good luck to them. They disappear round 
the next traverse. 

Our men sing many mad burlesques on their 
own splendour — parodies on their daily fineness. 
Here's a last example — a take-off on "A Little 
Bit of Heaven: " 

" Oh, a little bit of shrapnel fell from out the sky one day, 
And it landed on a soldier in a field not far away ; 
But when they went to find him he was bust beyond re- 
pair. 
So they pulled his legs and arms off and they left him 
lying there. 



THE GLORY OF THE TRENCHES 125 

Then they buried him in Flanders just to make the new 

crops grow. 
He'll make the best manure, they say, and sure they ought 

to know. 
And they put a little cross up which bore his name so 

grand, 
On the day he took his farewell for a better Promised 

Land. 

One learns to laugh — one has to — just as 
he has to learn to believe in immortality. The 
Front affords plenty of occasions for humour 
if a man has only learnt to laugh at himself. I 
had been sent forward to report at a battalion 
headquarters as liaison ofificer for an attack. 
The headquarters were in a captured dug-out 
somewhere under a ruined house. Just as I got 
there and was searching among the fallen walls 
for an entrance, the Hun barrage came down. 
It was like the Yellowstone Park when all the 
geysers are angry at the same time. Roofs, 
beams, chips of stone commenced to fly in every 
direction. In the middle of the hubbub a small 
dump of bombs was struck by a shell and started 
to explode behind me. The blast of the explo- 
sion caught me up and hurled me down fifteen 
stairs of the dug-out I had been trying to dis- 
cover. I landed on all fours in a place full of 
darkness; a door banged behind me. I don't 
know how long I lay there. Something was 



126 THE GLORY OF THE TRENCHES 

squirming under me. A voice said plaintively, 
" I don't know who you are, but I wish you'd 
get off. I'm the adjutant." 

It's a queer country, that place we call " out 
there." You approach our front-line, as it is 
to-day, across anywhere from five to twenty miles 
of battlefields. Nothing in the way of habita- 
tion is left. Everything has been beaten into 
pulp by hurricanes of shell-fire. First you come 
to a metropolis of horse-lines, which makes you 
think that a mammoth circus has arrived. Then 
you come to plank roads and little light railways, 
running out like veins across the mud. Far 
away there's a ridge and a row of charred trees, 
which stand out gloomily etched against the sky. 
The sky is grey and damp and sickly ; fleecy balls 
of smoke burst against it — shrapnel. You 
wonder whether they've caught anybody. Over- 
head you hear the purr of engines — a flight of 
aeroplanes breasting the clouds. Behind you 
observation balloons hang stationary, like gigan- 
tic tethered sausages. 

If you're riding, you dismount before you 
reach the ridge and send your horse back; the 
Hun country is in sight on the other side. You 
creep up cautiously, taking careful note of where 
the shells are falling. There's nothing to be 
gained by walking into a barrage; you make up 



THE GLORY OF THE TRENCHES 127 

your mind to wait. The rate of fire has slack- 
ened; you make a dash for it. From the ridge 
there's a pathway which runs down through the 
blackened wood; two men going alone are not 

likely to be spotted. Not likely, but . 

There's an old cement Hun gun-pit to the right ; 
you take cover in it. " Pretty wide awake," you 
say to your companion, " to have picked us out 
as quickly as that." 

From this sheltered hiding you have time to 
gaze about you. The roof of the gun-pit is 
smashed in at one corner. Our heavies did that 
when the Hun held the ridge. It was good shoot- 
ing. A perfect warren of tunnels and dug-outs 
leads off in every direction. They were built by 
the forced labour of captive French civilians. 
We have found requests from them scrawled in 
pencil on the boards : " I, Jean Ribeau, was 
alive and well on May 12th, 19 15. H this meets 
the eye of a friend, I beg that he will inform my 
wife," etc. ; after which follows the wife's ad- 
dress. These underground fortifications proved 
as much a snare as a protection to our enemies. 
I smile to remember how after our infantry had 
advanced three miles, they captured a Hun major 
busily shaving himself in his dug-out, quite un- 
aware that anything unusual was happening. 
He was very angry because he had been calling 



128 THE GLORY OF THE TRENCHES 

in vain for his man to bring his hot water. 
When he heard the footsteps of our infantry on 
the stairs, he thought it was his servant and 
started strafing. He got the surprise of his ven- 
erable Hfe when he saw the khaki. 

From the gun-pit the hill slants steeply to the 
plain. It was once finely wooded. Now the 
trees lie thick as corpses where an attack has 
failed, scythed down by bursting shells. From 
the foot of the hill the plain spreads out, a sea 
of furrowed slime and craters. It's difficult to 
pick out trenches. Nothing is moving. It's 
hard to believe that anything can live down there. 
Suddenly, as though a gigantic egg-beater were 
at work, the mud is thrashed and tormented. 
Smoke drifts across the area that is being strafed; 
through the smoke the stakes and wire hurtle. 
If you hadn't been in flurries of that sort your- 
self, you'd think that no one could exist through 
it. It's ended now; once again the country lies 
dead and breathless in a kind of horrible sus- 
pense. Suspense! Yes, that's the word. 

Beyond the mud, in the far cool distance is a 
green untroubled country. The Huns live there. 
That's the worst of doing all the attacking; we 
live on the recent battlefields we have won, 
whereas the enemy retreats into untouched clean- 
ness. One can see church steeples peeping above 



THE GLORY OF THE TRENCHES 129 

woods, chateaus gleaming, and stretches of shin- 
ing river. It looks innocent and kindly, but 
from the depth of its greenness invisible eyes 
peer out. Do you make one unwary movement, 
and over comes a flock of shells. 

At night from out this swamp of vileness a 
phantom city floats up; it is composed of the 
white Very lights and multi-coloured flares which 
the Hun employs to protect his front-line from 
our patrols. For brief spells No Man's Land 
becomes brilliant as day. Many of his flares are 
prearranged signals, meaning that his artillery 
is shooting short or calling for an S.O.S. The 
combination of lights which mean these things 
are changed with great frequency, lest we should 
guess. The on-looker, with a long night of ob- 
serving before him, becomes imaginative and 
weaves out for the dancing lights a kind of Shell- 
Hole Nights' Entertainment. The phantom city 
over there is London, New York, Paris, accord- 
ing to his fancy. He's going out to dinner with 
his girl. All those flares are arc-lamps along 
boulevards; that last white rocket that went 
flaming across the sky, was the faery taxi which 
is to speed him on his happy errand. It isn't 
so, one has only to remember. 

We were in the Somme for several months. 
The mud was up to our knees almost all the time. 



I30 THE GLORY OF THE TRENCHES 

We were perishingly cold and very rarely dry. 
There was no natural cover. When we went up 
forward to observe, we would stand in water to 
our knees for twenty-four hours rather than go 
into the dug-outs; they were so full of vermin 
and battened flies. Wounded and strayed men 
often drowned on their journey back from the 
front-line. Many of the dead never got buried; 
lives couldn't be risked in carrying them out. 
We were so weary that the sight of those who 
rested for ever, only stirred in us a quiet envy. 
Our emotions were too exhausted for hatred — 
they usually are, unless some new Hunnishness 
has roused them. When we're having a bad 
time, we glance across No Man's Land and say, 
" Poor old Fritzie, he's getting the worst of it." 
That thought helps. 

An attack is a relaxation from the interminable 
monotony. It means that we shall exchange the 
old mud, in which we have been living, for new 
mud which may be better. Months of work and 
preparation have led up to it; then one morning 
at dawn, in an intense silence we wait with our 
eyes glued on our watches for the exact second 
which is zero hour. All of a sudden our guns 
open up, joyously as a peal of bells. It's like 
Judgment Day. A wild excitement quickens the 
heart. Every privation was worth this moment. 



THE GLORY OF THE TRENCHES 131 

You wonder where you'll be by night-fall — over 
there, in the Hun support trenches, or in a green 
world which you used to sing about on Sundays. 
You don't much care, so long as you've completed 
your job. " We're well away," you laugh to the 
chap next you. The show has commenced. 

When you have given people every reason 
you can think of which explains the spirit of 
our men, they still shake their heads in a be- 
wildered manner, murmuring, " I don't know 
how you stand it." I'm going to make one last 
attempt at explanation. 

We stick it out by believing that we're in the 
right — to believe you're in the right makes a lot 
of difference. You glance across No Man's 
Land and say, " Those blighters are wrong ; I'm 
right." If you believe that with all the strength 
of your soul and mind, you can stand anything. 
To allow yourself to be beaten would be to own 
that you weren't. 

To still hold that you're right in the face of 
armed assertions from the Hun that you're 
wrong, requires pride in your regiment, your 
division, your corps and, most of all, in your own 
integrity. No one who has not worn a uniform 
can understand what pride in a regiment can do 
for a man. For instance, in France every man 
wears his divisional patch, which marks him. 



132 THE GLORY OF THE TRENCHES 

He's jolly proud of his division and wouldn't 
consciously do anything to let it down. If he 
hears anything said to its credit, he treasures the 
saying up; it's as if he himself had been men- 
tioned in despatches. It was rumoured this year 
that the night before an attack, a certain Imperial 
General called his battalion commanders to- 
gether. When they were assembled, he said, 
*' Gentlemen, I have called you together to tell 
you that to-morrow morning you will be con- 
fronted by one of the most difficult tasks that has 
ever been allotted to you; you will have to 
measure up to the traditions of the division on our 
left — the First Canadian Division, which is in 
my opinion the finest fighting division in France.'^ 
I don't know whether the story is true or not. 
If the Imperial General didn't say it, he ought to 
have. But because I belong to the First Cana- 
dian Division, I believe the report true and set 
store by it. Every new man who joins our di- 
vision hears that story. He feels that he, too, 
has got to be worthy of it. When he's tempted 
to get the " wind-up," he glances down at the 
patch on his arm. It means as much to him as 
a V. C. ; so he steadies his nerves, squares his jaws 
and plays the man. 

There's believing you're right. There's your 
sense of pride, and then there's something else, 



THE GLORY OF THE TRENCHES 133 

without which neither of the other two would 
help you. It seems a mad thing to say with ref- 
erence to fighting men, but that other thing which 
enables you to meet sacrifice gladly is love. 
There's a song we sing in England, a great fa- 
vourite which, when it has recounted all the things 
we need to make us good and happy, tops the 
list with these final requisites, *' A little patience 
and a lot of love." We need the patience — that 
goes without saying; but it's the love that helps 
us to die gladly — love for our cause, our pals, 
our family, our country. Under the disguise of 
duty one has to do an awful lot of loving at the 
Front. One of the finest examples of the thing 
I'm driving at, happened comparatively recently. 
In a recent attack the Hun set to work to knock 
out our artillery. He commenced with a heavy 
shelling of our batteries — this lasted for some 
hours. He followed it up by clapping down on 
them a gas-barrage. The gunners' only chance 
of protecting themselves from the deadly fumes 
was to wear their gas-helmets. All of a sudden, 
just as the gassing of our batteries was at its 
worst, all along our front-line S.O.S. rockets 
commenced to go up. Our infantry, if they 
weren't actually being attacked, were expecting a 
heavy Hun counter-attack, and were calling on us 
by the quickest means possible to help them. 



134 THE GLORY OF THE TRENCHES 

Of a gun-detachment there are two men who 
cannot do their work accurately in gas-helmets 
— one of these is the layer and the other is the 
fuse-setter. If the infantry were to be saved, 
two men out of the detachment of each protect- 
ing gun must sacrifice themselves. Instantly, 
without waiting for orders, the fuse-setters and 
layers flung aside their helmets. Our guns 
opened up. The unmasked men lasted about 
twenty minutes ; when they had been dragged out 
of the gun-pits choking or in convulsions, two 
more took their places without a second's hesita- 
tion. This went on for upwards of two hours. 
The reason given by the gunners for their splen- 
did, calculated devotion to duty was that they 
weren't going to let their pals in the trenches 
down. You may call their heroism devotion to 
duty or anything you like; the motive that in- 
spired it was love. 

When men, having done their " bit " get safely 
home from the Front and have the chance to live 
among the old affections and enjoyments, the 
memory of the splendid sharing of the trenches 
calls them back. That memory blots out all the 
tragedy and squalor; they think of their willing 
comrades in sacrifice and cannot rest. 

I was with a young officer who was probably 



THE GLORY OF THE TRENCHES 135 

the most wounded man who ever came out of 
France ahve. He had lain for months in hos- 
pital between sandbags, never allowed to move, 
he was so fragile. He had had great shell- 
wounds in his legs and stomach; the artery be- 
hind his left ear had been all but severed. When 
he was at last well enough to be discharged, the 
doctors had warned him never to play golf or 
polo, or to take any violent form of exercise 
lest he should do himself a damage. He had 
returned to Canada for a rest and was back in 
London, trying to get sent over again to the 
Front. 

We had just come out from the Alhambra. 
Whistles were being blown shrilly for taxis. 
London theatre-crowds were slipping cosily 
through the muffled darkness — a man and girl, 
always a man and a girl. They walked very 
closely ; usually the girl was laughing. Suddenly 
the contrast flashed across my mind between this 
bubbling joy of living and the poignant silence 
of huddled forms beneath the same starlight, not 
a hundred miles away in No IMan's Land. He 
must have been seeing the same vision and 
making the same contrast. He pulled on my 
arm. " I've got to go back." 

" But you've done your ' bit,' " I expostulated. 



136 THE GLORY OF THE TRENCHES 

"If you do go back and don't get hit, you may 
burst a blood vessel or something, if what the 
doctors told you is true." 

He halted me beneath an arc-light. I could 
see the earnestness in his face. " I feel about it 
this way," he said, " If I'm out there, I'm just 
one more. A lot of chaps out there are jolly 
tired ; if I was there, I'd be able to give some chap 
a rest." 

That was love; for a man, if he told the truth, 
would say, " I hate the Front." Yet most of us, 
if you ask us, " Do you want to go back? " would 
answer, " Yes, as fast as I can." Why? Partly 
because it's difficult to go back, and in difficulty 
lies a challenge; but mostly because we love the 
chaps. Not any particular chap, but all the fel- 
lows out there who are laughing and enduring. 

Last time I met the most wounded man who 
ever came out of France alive, it was my turn to 
be in hospital. He came to visit me there, and 
told me that he'd been all through the Vimy 
racket and was again going back. 

" But how did you manage to get into the game 
again ? " I asked. " I thought the doctors 
wouldn't pass you." 

He laughed silly. " I didn't ask the doctors. 
If you know the right people, these things can 
always be worked." 



THE GLORY OF THE TRENCHES 137 

More than half of the bravery at the Front is 
due to our love of the folks we have left behind. 
We're proud of them; we want to give them 
reason to be proud of us. We want them to 
share our spirit, and we don't want to let them 
down. The finest reward I've had since I be- 
came a soldier was when my father, who'd come 
over from America to spend my ten days' leave 
■with me in London, saw me off on my journey 
back to France. I recalled his despair when I 
had first enlisted, and compared it with what 
happened now. We were at the pier-gates, 
where we had to part. I said to him, "If you 
knew that I was going to die in the next month, 
would you rather I stayed or went?" "Much 
rather you went," he answered. Those words 
made me feel that I was the son of a soldier, 
even if he did wear mufti. One would have to 
play the game pretty low to let a father like that 
down. 

When you come to consider it, a quitter is al- 
ways a selfish man. It's selfishness that makes a 
man a coward or a deserter. If he's in a danger- 
ous place and runs away, all he's doing is think- 
ing of himself. 

I've been supposed to be talking about God As 
We See Him. I don't know whether I have. 
As a matter of fact if you had asked me, when 



138 THE GLORY OF THE TRENCHES 

I was out there, whether there was any reHgion 
in the trenches, I should have repHed, " Certainly 
not." Now that I've been out of the fighting for 
a while, I see that there is religion there; a re- 
ligion which will dominate the world when the 
war is ended — the religion of heroism. It's a 
religion in which men don't pray much. With 
me, before I went to the Front, prayer was a 
habit. Out there I lost the habit; what one was 
doing seemed sufficient. I got the feeling that I 
might be meeting God at any moment, so I didn't 
need to be worrying Him all the time, hanging on 
to a spiritual telephone and feeling slighted if He 
didn't answer me directly I rang Him up. If 
God was really interested in me, He didn't need 
constant reminding. When He had a world to 
manage, it seemed best not to interrupt Him with 
frivolous petitions, but to put my prayers into my 
work. That's how we all feel out there. 

God as we see Him ! I couldn't have told you 
how I saw Him before I went to France. It's 
funny — you go away to the most damnable un- 
dertaking ever invented, and you come back 
cleaner in spirit. The one thing that redeems 
the horror is that it does make a man momen- 
tarily big enough to be in sympathy with his 
Creator — he gets such glimpses of Him in his 
fellows. 



THE GLORY OF THE TRENCHES 139 

There was a time when I thought it was 
rather up to God to explain Himself to the crea- 
tures He had fashioned — since then I've ac- 
quired the point of view of a soldier. I've learnt 
discipline and my own total unimportance. In 
the Army discipline gets possession of your soul ; 
you learn to suppress yourself, to obey implicitly, 
to think of others before yourself. You learn 
to jump at an order, to forsake your own con- 
venience at any hour of the day or night, to go 
forward on the most lonely and dangerous er- 
rands without complaining. You learn to feel 
that there is only one thing that counts in life 
and only one thing you can make out of it — the 
spirit you have developed in encountering its 
difficulties. Your body is nothing; it can be 
smashed in a minute. How frail it is you never 
realise until you have seen men smashed. So 
you learn to tolerate the body, to despise Death 
and to place all your reliance on courage — which 
when it is found at its best is the power to endure 
for the sake of others. 

When we tliink of God, we think of Him in 
just about the same way that a Tommy in the 
front-line thinks of Sir Douglas Haig. Heaven 
is a kind of General Headquarters. All that the 
Tommy in the front-line knows of an offensive 
is that orders have reached him, through the 



I40 THE GLORY OF THE TRENCHES 

appointed authorities, that at zero hour he will 
climb out of his trench and go over the top to 
meet a reasonable chance of wounds and death. 
He doesn't say, " I don't know whether I will 
climb out. I never saw Sir Douglas Haig — » 
there mayn't be any such person. I want to have 
a chat with him first. HI agree with him, after 
that I may go over the top — and, then again, I 
may not. We'll see about it." 

Instead, he attributes to his Commander-in- 
Chief the same patriotism, love of duty, and 
courage which he himself tries to practice. He 
believes that if he and Sir Douglas Haig were to 
change places, Sir Douglas Haig would be quite 
as willing to sacrifice himself. He obeys; he 
doesn't question. 

That's the way every Tommy and officer comes 
to think of God — as a Commander-in-Chief 
whom he has never seen, but whose orders he 
blindly carries out. 

The religion of the trenches is not a religion 
which analyses God with impertinent specula- 
tion. It isn't a religion which takes up much of 
His time. It's a religion which teaches men to 
carry on stoutly and to say, *' I've tried to do 
my bit as best I know how. I guess God knows 
it. If I ' go west ' to-day, He'll remember that 



THE GLORY OF THE TRENCHES 141 

I played the game. So I guess He'll forget about 
my sins and take me to Himself." 

That Is the simple religion of the trenches as I 
have learnt it — a religion not without glory; 
to carry on as bravely as you know how, and 
to trust God without worrying Him. 



THE END 



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